Is born-again bank buster for real?

Who is Sandy Weill and why should we care that he now says he thinks big banks should be broken up?

Weill built Citibank into the financial colossus whose spectacular collapse in 2008 helped tank our economy. He said he had a vision of creating giant financial supermarkets that conjured up convenience, friendly service, well-lit aisles and lots of choices. But what he was actually building were massive financial tankers fueled on fraud and risky, toxic assets no one understood, kept afloat with dirty back-room deals, hijacked regulators, lobbying and campaign contributions.

To make that vision a reality, Weill also did more than anyone else to drive the final spike through the heart of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which for seventy years had kept risky investment banking separate from federally-guaranteed traditional banking, reducing the risk of bank failures. President Clinton signed the bill repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999.

For his efforts, Weill, 79, made gazillions before he retired in 2006, ahead of the financial collapse.

He also earned a spot among a very select group - Time Magazine’s “25 people to blame for the financial crisis.”  Weill, Time said, helped create the country’s “swollen banks,” which remain one of the economy most serious unsolved problems.

His Citibank is one the worst, and remains on life support only through $45 million [million?] worth of the taxpayers’ generosity.

It didn’t help Weill’s reputation that a few weeks after Citibank accepted its bailout, he used the Citibank jet to fly to his vacation in Cabo, a flight immortalized by the poets on the New York Post copy desk with the headline: “Pigs Fly.”

It was only six months ago that Weill announced he was “downsizing” and simplifying his life, selling his Central Park West apartment in Manhattan for $88 million – more than double what he’d paid for it, as well as attempting to unload his yacht for nearly $60 million. Weill moved to another apartment downstairs.

But downsizing doesn’t mean the same for an uber-banker that it does for the rest of us. He spent $31 million on the largest real estate-deal in Sonoma County’s history, buying a Tuscan-inspired villa that includes 8 acres of vineyards, seven miles of private hiking trails, and an 11,605-square-foot mansion made with 800-year-old Italian roof tiles and 200-year-old wood beams, and a fire truck that comes with seven firefighters. A real estate agent cautioned against viewing Weill’s purchase as a sign that the real estate market in the county north of San Francisco was recovering. As one Coldwell Banker agent said: “[The sale] is not an indicator of an emerging real estate recovery, but rather the ability of the world’s wealthiest individuals to buy what they desire.”

There’s been all kinds of speculation about why has now come out in favor breaking up big banks. But the best way to judge whether he’s serious, or just trying to get a little good PR, is to examine how much cash he’s willing to spend to make it happen.

When bankers, led by Weill, wanted to repeal Glass-Steagall, they fought for 20 years and spent millions in lobbying and campaign contributions before they won. The big banks would certainly put up a similar fight against its reinstatement. No one knows better than Weill that when it comes to changing banking regulations, it’s not what people say that matters; money talks.

How much is Weill willing to spend in support of his newfound conviction? Without massive amounts of money behind them, his words are no more than an old mogul’s sad, empty cry for attention.

 

 

 

Bankers' gambles – now with a bailout guaranteed

After the 2008 banks bailout, we were promised that financial reform was going to prevent future bailouts.

Never again.

But as we approach the fourth anniversary of the financial collapse, we’re learning just how hollow those promises were.

The most recent example stems from reports that regulators have secretly designated derivatives clearinghouses too big to fail in a financial emergency.

That means that in a crisis, such clearinghouses, in which risky credit default swaps are traded, would be bailed out at taxpayer expense through secret access to cheap money at the Federal Reserve’s credit window.

That’s where the big banks and the rest of corporate America lined after the 2008 to borrow trillions at low interest – with no strings attached.

The Fed didn’t require the banks to share that low interest with consumers or homeowners. The Fed didn’t require that banks make some attempt to fix the foreclosure mess. The Fed didn’t require corporations hire the unemployed or lower outrageous CEO pay.

The Fed just shoveled out the cheap loans.

Now the Fed is planning to extend that generosity, as a matter of policy, to derivative clearinghouses – which puts taxpayers directly on the hook for Wall Street’s risky gambles, like the ones that recently cost J.P. Morgan Chase $2 billion.

While those trades didn’t threaten to sink the economy, it was the unraveling of those kinds of complex gambles that tanked the economy in 2008.

Nobody knows for sure how large the derivatives market is, but the estimates are truly mind-boggling. One derivatives expert estimates that there were $1.2 quadrillion in derivatives last year – 20 times the size of the world’s economy.

While requiring these derivatives to be traded on clearinghouses is supposed to increase transparency, that assumes regulators are aggressive, diligent and understand the trades.

But signaling that these derivatives should be eligible for a bailout is nothing short of insane, at least from the taxpayers’ perspective. From the bankers’ perspective, it’s a pretty good deal, and a reassuring indication that nothing much has changed since the financial crisis: the regulators are still deep in the bankers’ pocket.

Meanwhile, the real reforms that might have a shot at actually fixing the problems and protecting our economy from the big bankers’ addiction to risk get little or no consideration in what passes for political debate.

The best step we could take is to re-impose the Depression-era   Glass-Steagall Act, which creates walls between safe, vanilla, and consumer banking (which have traditionally been federally guaranteed, and riskier investment banking and derivatives trading But the bankers oppose Glass-Steagall, and for the present, they remain in control of both political parties and the regulators’ financial policies.

Biggest Loser, Too Big to Fail Edition

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Biggest Loser, Too Big to Fail Bank edition!

Each week we tally up the bad behavior of a banker who took taxpayers’ money in the bailout, only to engage in more obnoxious antics calculated to hurt the very taxpayers whose generosity has guaranteed the bankers’ gazillion dollar annual compensation.

This week we’re featuring a surprise guest, a banker who, in the past, the press fawned over as one of the savviest Wall Street titans, who managed to actually enhance his reputation during and after the 2008 financial collapse.

Please welcome JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bank is the biggest in the nation, with total assets of $2.3 trillion.

He’s not one of those CEOs who presides over a big bank that everybody assumes is a zombie, like Bank of America and Citibank.

No, Dimon and his bank actually made money. He was presumed to know what he was doing. Especially by President Obama, who welcomed him to the White House on numerous occasions.

And Dimon has distinguished himself as the most vocal opponent of bank regulation, which Dimon says could be bad, not just for him, but for America.

Dimon is tops in the public relations game – his reputation wasn’t tarnished even after federal authorities found that his bank was improperly foreclosing on the nation’s veterans and JPMorgan Chase had to pay $45 million two months ago to settle a lawsuit.

Dimon was still invited to the White House and fancy seminars where the attendees hung on his every word.

That was before Dimon admitted last week that one of his top traders had lost $2 billion on trades that were supposed to hedge against other risky bets that the banks’ traders were taking.

These were bets that were supposed to reduce the bank’s risks, not cost it $2 billion.

It’s just the latest evidence that not even the smartest banker, not even Jamie Dimon, who just a couple of weeks ago had dismissed warnings about the bets as a “tempest in a teapot,” has a clue as to how their own firm’s complicated financial engineering works.

Admittedly, the competition for too big to fail biggest loser is tough because the bailed-out bankers’ behavior has been so bad.

Determining the biggest winners is easy, however: the politicians and lobbyists who have collected millions in campaign contributions and lobbying fees from bankers who have successfully crippled efforts at real reform. JP Morgan Chase’s latest losses will no doubt reinvigorate the debate over financial reform, causing the banks to shovel yet more money to the politicians and lobbyists in their effort to make sure that the only true reform – breaking up the big banks, so they’re not too big to fail  – never happens.

Beyond the reality TV theatrics of the political debate, we know who the real losers are – the taxpayers who foot the bill and citizens who are shut out of political debate by the corporations who dominate it with their money.

President Obama and his administration like to brag that taxpayers are making a profit from big chunks of the bailout. But that PR covers up the real story on the bailout: the federal government spent trillions to make the too big to fail banks like JP Morgan Chase bigger and more powerful, not to rein them in.

As Charlie Geist, a Wall Street historian and professor at Manhattan College told Politico, “The guy in the street in 2008 and 2009 was worried about his or her deposits, and now it’s clear they should still be worried.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Main Street talks back

Inside the D.C. bubble, Wall Street’s titans continue to have their way.

Their Republican allies in the Senate helped the titans kill the Buffet Rule, which would have required those who made more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes, double what investors pay on capital gains income.

Wall Street has continued to stifle efforts to regulate risky derivatives like the ones that led to the financial collapse, while most of the Dodd-Frank financial reform enacted in the wake of the financial crisis has yet to be implemented.

In the Wall Street Journal (no link), columnist David Weidner asserted Wednesday that Wall Street has gotten some of its swagger back. “Big financial interests,” Weidner wrote, “are beating back every broadside with a vigor not seen since the financial-bubble days.”

But outside Washington it is a different story.

Voting for the first time on the CEO compensation of a too-big –to-fail bank, Citibank shareholders rejected a $14.9 million annual compensation for its top executive.  The “say on pay” vote, mandated as part of Dodd-Frank, is strictly advisory. Citibank officials can ignore it if they want.

For years, the company’s executives had promised that their pay would be strictly tied to performance. The CEO, Vikram Pandit, had been making $1 a year since the bailout during which time the bank performed miserably. But this year, the bank’s directors decided that Pandit deserved to get back on the gravy train with the rest of the industry’s CEOs.

The following day, shareholders at another smaller regional bank, FirstMeritCorp of Akron, Ohio, rejected the compensation package for their CEO in another “say on pay” vote. Directors of that bank wanted to raise the CEO’s pay $1 million to $6.4 million a year, after the bank’s stock had fallen 20 percent during the past year.

They’re just a couple of non-binding votes. But I found it striking that when Main Street voters had the opportunity to express their opinion directly on one aspect of Wall Street’s practices, the voters voiced disapproval.

Wall Street can’t dismiss their shareholders as a bunch of Occupy Wall Street types out to destroy the system, or marginalize their rejection as mere envy. These are hardnosed investors who would like nothing better than for Wall Street banks to get on solid footing and make money. But these voters realize that despite all the administration’s happy talk about how well the bailouts have worked, the banks still aren’t sound, and that the outrageous pay for top executives who haven’t delivered is a big part of the problem because it encourages focus on short-term profit, loading up on risk and relying on continuing government help to prop up their businesses.

According to Weidner, polls show that most voters have moved on from anger at Wall Street. That may be so. But if ordinary citizens, rather than Washington insiders beholden to Wall Street, were making decisions, I think they would coolly, calmly and rationally favor the wealthy paying their fair share of taxes, and sensible regulation that would keep the titans from getting too carried away with themselves and their schemes.

 

How Mitt Could Win

Why doesn’t Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s free-market gospel include a ringing call to break up the too big to fail banks?

Over at the conservative American Enterprise Institute blog, James Pethokoukis suggests Romney could benefit if he did just that.

After all, this is no longer a position favored only by Occupy Wall Street.

All kinds of establishment figures now acknowledge that breaking up the big banks is needed to heal our financial system, and that as long as we don’t, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout.

The most recent public official to reach this conclusion is none other than Richard Fisher, the president of the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, who last week issued a report in which he concluded: “The too big to fail institutions that amplified and prolonged the recent financial crisis remain a hindrance to full economic recovery and to the very ideal of American capitalism.”

This should be catnip for Romney, who professes to be all about ending government interference in the free market.

What the Dallas Fed’s report makes clear is that the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation and the policies of the Obama administration haven’t lessened the power of the too big to fail banks, or made them healthier – it’s helped them gain market share while doing little to force them to reduce the same risky business practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse.

While Dodd-Frank theoretically sets up a process to deal with too big to fail institutions when they get in trouble, our politicians and regulators by their actions have signaled to the big banks that they don’t have the guts to break them up or get them to change how they do business.

For a politician in Romney’s position, staking out a position against the big banks would give him the high ground against the president, who claims to be reining in the banks’ bad behavior but isn’t.

It would help him with the Tea Party activists, who rail against the bank bailouts and crony capitalism. Promising tough action on the banks would also help him with independents who understandably don’t trust all the political double-talk they hear.

But Romney doesn’t have the  guts to do it. His free market rhetoric stops right at the bankers’ door, where he must appear meekly with hat in hand, asking for donations, just like the president of the United States, from bankers who continue to prosper only because of the trillions of dollars worth of favors done for them by politicians using taxpayers’ money.

The top 5 donors to Romney’s campaign are people associated with bailed out banks, according to the Center For Responsive Politics. The president raised an unprecedented $15.8 million from the financial sector in 2008, while his administration was in the midst of bailing them out. Though Romney has the edge in Wall Street fundraising now, the president has vowed to fight back ­– including a pledge not to demonize Wall Street.

The big media and the politicians all talk about these policies as though they’re great intellectual debates about clashing views of the role of government. But when it comes to the too big to fail banks, all Romney’s free market preaching is just so much hot air.

This is the dishonest heart of our politics. What neither Romney nor the president, nor apparently the American Enterprise Institute, can acknowledge is that it’s all about the money.

 

Second-Half Score Depends on Who Calls the Plays

Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler ad during the Super Bowl knocked me out.

It was stunningly effective piece of work. It resonated deeply with me as a skillfully crafted message – even as I knew it wasn’t telling the whole truth about the comeback of Detroit, my hometown.

Still, I wanted to believe, if only for a few minutes, that we could work together to confront our national problems, and millions of other Super Bowl watchers joined me in that yearning.

It reminded me of another inspired piece of highly distilled corn-pone football-inspired poetry: what Coach told his players on `Friday Night Lights,’ “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

With its irresistibly simple pep-talk pitch, the ad stirred up strong feelings, both for what it said and what it left unsaid about what’s actually going on in Detroit and the U.S.

It showed once again the power of plain language, delivered in Eastwood’s classic growl.

It reminded me how ineffective those of us who oppose corporate power have often been in claiming for our cause our deeply rooted patriotism and our pride in how every-day Americans have fought again and again, against terrible obstacles, to build a democracy that would work for everyone.

It also provoked deep feelings about Clint Eastwood, the ever-evolving artist.

He's been a great champion of Detroit. He made one of his finest films, “Gran Torino,” in the city. Released in 2008 in the wake of the financial collapse, it tells the story of the redemption of a retired autoworker, recently widowed and deeply racist.

Reviewing the film, Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times: “Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and `70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt [Eastwood’s character’s] love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.”

Eastwood made `Gran Torino’ under the generous tax breaks of a program designed to encourage filmmaking in Detroit, a program that has since been limited by the state’s current Republican governor, eroding the promise of the nascent film industry.

For the Chrysler ad, the auto company enlisted not only Eastwood, but hired a top ad agency, Wieden-Kennedy; the director of several terrific films, David Gordon Green; and two top-notch writers: Oregon-based poet Matthew Dickman and Texas-based fiction writer, Smith Henderson.

Even so, it’s an ad, meant to sell cars by inspiring hope and pride in Americans’ ability to get up and come back after a hard punch.

So the ad doesn’t quite tell you the real score at the end of the first half, nor does it come entirely clean on who's been playing on which team.

If the 99 percent were writing the script, not Chrysler, Eastwood might have something very different to say about our game plan as the second half gets underway.

It doesn’t mention that the majority owner of Chrysler is now Fiat, an Italian auto firm, or that Chrysler, newly profitable after it $12.5 billion taxpayer bailout, now pays new employees $14-$16 an hour, about half of what Chrysler employees used to be paid.

“The gratitude that many Detroit workers felt just after the bailout,” Reuters reported last October, “has given way to a frustrated sense that blue-collar workers have not shared equally in the industry's comeback.”

I wonder what Clint Eastwood’s characters might say about our current predicament.

Something tells me Eastwood’s iconic Dirty Harry character wouldn’t think much of our state attorneys general’s settlement with the big banks, which lets the bankers off the hook for fraud in the foreclosure process in exchange for ineffective and inadequate assistance for homeowners.

Describing the $26 billion settlement, the Times acknowledges it would “help

a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure.”

Meanwhile, while it will be good for the banks to get the foreclosure fraud charges behind them, it remains unclear how much the settlement will help the “moribund” housing market, the Times reports.

The $26 million will be distributed to states according to a complex formula. Actual victims of foreclosure fraud are supposed to get about $1,500 apiece. An undetermined number of underwater homeowners will get their principals written down by about $20,000. Some funding will also go to further investigation into banker fraud and consumer education.

Unfortunately neither the Obama Administration nor the AGs’ credibility is very good in living up to previous promises to help homeowners. Previous administration efforts, as well as previous AG settlements, have delivered much less than they initially promised, plagued by inadequate oversight and relying on voluntary bank participation. For more details, check Naked Capitalism; for more critique, Firedoglake.

What would Eastwood’s Dirty Harry think?

Just another day at the office, with the thugs getting away with their crimes in a world gone awry.

I couldn’t help wondering: would Dirty Harry negotiate with an intruder who robbed your house? Would he suggest to the intruder, “OK, just give back 30 percent of what you took and clean out the rain gutters and we’ll call it even?”

Unlikely. Dirty Harry would track down the crooks, scowl and start blasting away with his trademark .44 Magnum.

One of our previous presidents, Ronald Reagan, understood the visceral power of Dirty Harry and evoked him in a fight with Congress, when it was threatening to raise taxes. Reagan said he would veto any tax increase. “Go ahead,” the former president said, quoting the Dirty Harry character, “make my day.”

You’ll find very little of that spirit among the Obama administration officials and lawmen and law women assigned to the big bank beat.

Walt, the character in  `Gran Torino,’ and Dirty Harry are very different characters, separated by age and experience. They both live in broken worlds, filled with violence and cynicism. But confronted with today’s bankers, they would recognize them for what they are: shameless bullies, terrifying our neighborhood. And they would recognize the Obama administration and the state AGS who negotiated with them rather than investigated them for what they have become: cowards.

 

 

Betrayals and Bailouts

In the latest betrayal from Freddie Mac, the same clever devils who helped bring us the financial collapse three years ago, there is unfortunately no surprise.

The high rollers who run the company, whose mission is supposed to be to support homeowners, apparently still think it’s a good idea to use our homes as a casino.

That’s the conclusion reached in an investigative report by NPR/Pro Publica, which found that Freddie Mac had placed billion-dollar investment bets that paid off when borrowers couldn’t refinance from high-interest mortgages into more affordable loans.

According to the NPR/Pro Publica report, Freddie Mac increased “these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.”

In effect, Freddie Mac combined high interest mortgages into packages of securities and sold some to speculators, but it kept the ones that would result in the biggest profits so long as the homeowner never refinanced. Freddie Mac stands to lose if its customers refinance and taske advantage of lower rates.

Freddie Mac was betting against homeowners even though taxpayers had bailed out it and its larger sister, Fannie Mae and the government placed the under a conservatorship after the housing bubble burst in 2008 and it faced mounting mortgage losses.

Though Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are known as government-sponsored entities, they in fact have been private, profit-making entities for four decades.

Congress created Fannie and Freddie as private companies with a public mission ­– supporting homeownership, by insuring the mortgages issued by commercial lenders. But the companies had government officials sitting on their boards, and got breaks on taxes and recordkeeping requirements.

During the real estate bubble, the two firms adopted all the bad behavior of other big financial institutions – and worse. Authorities found that at Fannie Mae, senior executives cooked the books between 1998 and 2004, making it look like they hit profit targets in order to justify $115 million in bonuses. Three top executives eventually reached a $31.4 million settlement [with govt or private private pre-bailout] – without admitting guilt.

Executives at the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae spent millions on campaign contributions and lobbying, courting both Democrats and Republicans (including presidential contender Newt Gingrich) in a successful campaign to ward off more stringent regulation and tighter reins on their bookkeeping, all the while taking on greater amounts of risk, establishing close ties with one of the worst offenders in spreading toxic loans, Countrywide Bank. Meanwhile executives at the two firms were paid lavishly, even after the bailout.

Republicans love to blame the GSEs for the financial collapse, labeling them do-gooder agencies who went wrong in pursuing too aggressively an agenda of providing housing to low-income people.

In his excellent autopsy of the financial collapse, “The Great American Stick-up,” Robert Scheer finds merit in much of the conservative critique. He labels the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “highly culpable” for causing the financial crisis – but not for the reasons Republicans say. While the GSEs used the rhetoric of helping people, their efforts to boost low-income and middle-class wasn’t their primary mission, or the reason for their downfall.

Fannie and Freddie didn’t go under because they were trying too hard to help people; it was because they were doing everything they could to super-charge their profits, just like the Wall Street firms.

Scheer quotes the testimony of a one-time regulator, Armando Falcon, who faced stiff opposition from Republicans as well as Democrats when he tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Falcon testified in April 2010 before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the causes of the meltdown. “The firms would not pursue any activity…unless there was a profit to be made,” Falcon said. “Fannie and Freddie invested in subprime and Alt A mortgages in order to increase profits and regain market share. Any impact on meeting affordable housing goals was a by-product of the activity.”

 

 

 

 

Busting Wall Street, by the numbers

How many FBI agents does it take to bust one Wall Street crook?

This isn’t the beginning of a joke. It’s one way to measure how serious the Obama’s administration latest highly touted financial fraud task force is about tackling its beat.

The task force is staffed with 10 FBI agents, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

You can get some idea of whether that’s an adequate number by comparing it to the law enforcement effort in the wake of the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s, a major but vastly smaller financial collapse.

It only cost the taxpayers a mere $150 billion in bailout money, compared to the 2008 banking collapse, which cost us trillions.

Bill Black, a former S&L regulator turned white-collar criminal law expert and law professor at University of Missouri at Kansas City, has been one of the sharpest critics of the administration’s sharpest critics.

Black makes the point that regulators investigating S&L fraud two decades ago made thousands of criminal referrals, and the FBI assigned 1,000 agents to follow up on those referrals. Black says the referrals led to more than 1,000 felony convictions, including the executives of the S&Ls.

Black is just one of many who have noticed that President Obama’s heart has not really been into the task of putting top bank executives in jail.

As recently as December 11, the president told 60 Minutes in an interview: “I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal.”

Black points out that this at best a non-answer; at worst it’s double-talk. The president says that “some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn’t illegal.”

So the reasonable follow-up question would be: where are the prosecutions, over the past 3 years, of the rest of the behavior, the part that was illegal?

The other aspect of Obama’s answer that I find worrisome is the president’s perspective – he acknowledges that he’s making a judgment based on a view from 40,000 feet.

That’s a distance of 7.5 miles. The president isn’t predicting the weather here; he’s talking about whether crimes were committed in the process of the worst financial disaster in almost a century.

Good prosecutors and FBI agents don’t investigate from 7.5 miles away. They get in a suspect’s face, and into their history, find out who their friends and associates are. They dig into their family lives if they need to.

That’s how they operate when their hearts are in it if they want to make the case.

But even when their hearts are in it, good law enforcement people can’t do their jobs without resources.

And that’s a decision the president can make. He doesn’t have to ask Congress.

Call the president today and let him know that we won’t be fooled by faux enforcement efforts, and the we know the difference between what 10 FBI agents can do and what 1,000 can do – even from seven miles away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bank Occupy Couldn't Live Without

Bank of America seems determined to keep providing fuel to keep the Occupy movement going strong.

You probably recall the bank’s plan to soak its customers by charging them to use their debit cards, which was withdrawn after a torrent of bad press.

Clearly, all is not happy in Bank of Americaland, where the stock has dropped about 50 percent from 2010 levels. Despite being propped up by millions in taxpayer help as well as by Warren Buffet, the bank remains in so much trouble that in September, the bank announced plans to lay off 40,000 employees, mainly in its consumer division.

Who needs those consumers anyway?

It’s not just the bank’s lowly employees that are losing their jobs. A couple of top executives are leaving too, but the bank made sure to cushion the pain of their leaving with millions of dollars in severance and benefits.

The bank was also forced to cut back one of its most prized activities last year, spending a paltry $2.2 million on lobbying last year, down from nearly $5 million before the financial collapse.

You may not have heard about the bank’s latest effort to keep the protestors busy. They’ve decided to put the squeeze on another bunch of customers, this time small-businesses.

Several small-business owners told the Los Angeles Times is now forcing them to pay their balances in full, instead of on a monthly basis, as they used to. This change, the business owners say, could wipe them out.

Meanwhile, a firm that helps small businesses get loans calls Bank of America’s level of small-business lending “a disgrace for the largest bank in the country”.

Ami Kassar, CEO and founder of MultiFunding, says Bank of America ranks 6,128 out of 6,800 based on its small-business lending.

Three years after the financial collapse, Wall Street is still a dysfunctional mess, providing little help for Main Street. Meanwhile, our political leaders, for the most part, show no inclination to correct the mistakes that have gotten us here.

 

 

The Overdogs Bite Back

Our corporate lords are a sensitive lot. They want it all. They want total control of the government and they want love and appreciation.

Who can blame them for being upset? They spend all that money to buy the government, hire all those lobbyists, all those PR people.

It’s true the politicians help them out when business is bad, but do they everything just the way the corporate overlords want? Apparently not.

Who knew?

And we don’t express enough love for them, or appreciate them enough for all the good things they say they do.

Instead, we brats just want them to pay more taxes, or put another way, the same rate of taxes they used to.

Even one of their own, Warren Buffet, tries to make them look bad by suggesting maybe they could afford to pay a little more in taxes.

Now the CEOs are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.

And they've created a new more loveable name for themselves:  job creators? Who wouldn’t love a job creator?

They want to make sure they’re getting their message across about how swell they are. It’s called, wonderfully enough, the Job Creators Alliance.

In an odd coincidence, their message bears a striking resemblance to pure Republican propaganda. Even the tiniest speck of regulation appearing on the horizon, for example Dodd-Frank financial regulation, causes the job creators to tremble and quake, and stop doing the only thing they really care about – creating jobs.

The Job Creators Alliance doesn’t blame the deep recession or the lack of demand for unemployment. They blame Dodd-Frank. This mild bit of financial regulation is blasted while the CEOs tote out one of the Republicans’ favorite phony themes – the financial collapse wasn’t caused by Wall Street greed, fraud and carelessness, but by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And the other big problem? You guessed it. Mandated health insurance.

Because both Dodd-Frank and mandated health insurance tamper with one of the job creators’ real sacred cows – the free market system.

As staunch defenders of the free market system, the CEO’s web site ought to be aflame with their righteous anger at the bailout and the Federal Reserve’s secret trillions in loans that propped up so many businesses in the wake of the economic collapse. But in what I’m sure is just an oversight, the job creators’ haven’t gotten around to posting about it yet.