Break up the banks: Gee, do ya think?

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

Did you ever stop to think that maybe the panics of 1893 and 1907 were planned, for the sole purpose of convincing Congress that a central bank was necessary?

No, we didn't. Because we are not paranoid. No one is smart enough to plan something like that (think of all the things that can go wrong or not work). And, since it would take multiple parties to pull it off, such a plan could never be kept secret.

Tell us, does anything occur in your world that is NOT the result of actions by some secret cabal that pulls all the strings?

[CuteOldGuy]

The truth is out there, but you won't find it in government reports or establishment media. You people need to get a grip. The government is longer here to serve you, they are here to control you. And they are very good at it. You've all fallen into line. Too bad. Iffy, Exy, LL you're smarter than that. Look behind the curtain and see who's running the show.

[DSK]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

Did you ever stop to think that maybe the panics of 1893 and 1907 were planned, for the sole purpose of convincing Congress that a central bank was necessary? Can you find the roll call vote on the Federal Reserve Act when it was passed by Congress? How many Senators were present when the vote was taken? Why did Woodrow Wilson regret signing the Act? Why did Jefferson, Madison and other Founders warn us of a central bank? How much value has the dollar lost since 1913?

I once spoke to a former US Senator, who happened to be friend of mine, just exactly who holds the power in Washington? He told me, without hesitation that it was the FED. The people are no longer the rulers of this country. Why did Meyer Rothschild say a couple hundred years ago, "Give me control of a nation's money supply, and I care not who makes the laws"? Who controls our money supply now?


You're buying into the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on a (formerly) free people.

The fraud is being perpetrated on all the other countries of the world that accept our unbacked currency. How does it hurt us to print money (or create it at virtually no cost electronically) and get items of value in return?
Even the small amount of interest we pay is dwarfed by the additional money created by expanding the balance sheet, AKA QE. You would think we have to pay the piper someday but the beauty of it is we don't. Our currency devalues at a rate greater than the interest we pay, and we pay them with the money we create. Fucking Madoff the greatest Ponzi fraud ever only wishes he controlled it!!!

If the value of our money decreased more than everyone elses, and they wouldn't take our money anymore, then we might have a problem if we needed anything from other countries, but they line up to sell us stuff denominated in dollars all the time. They are the chumps, not us!!!

[Guest032516]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

The truth is out there, but you won't find it in government reports or establishment media. You people need to get a grip. The government is longer here to serve you, they are here to control you. And they are very good at it. You've all fallen into line. Too bad. Iffy, Exy, LL you're smarter than that. Look behind the curtain and see who's running the show.

Jews, right?

[Rey Lengua]

Originally Posted by LexusLover

After the ACA.

Before you load up that band wagon for dismantling the Federal banking system you might want to read Henry B. Gonzales's (RIP) report on the South Texas "Rent-a-bank" scandal generated while he was on the banking subcommittee in Congress (House). The paper back version, if I recall correctly, was almost 3 inches thick of thin pages. Maybe 2.5 inches. And if you have read it, you might want to reread it.

There is good reason why the Western District of Texas (United States Courts) is called the "Wild, Wild West"!

Ahhhh...ole Henry B ( as in Bob Oso ! ) Gonzales... and fuck a lota RIP for THAT friggen socialist/communist MOFO that tried to impeach Ronald Regan and has a convection center named after his socialist liberal ass here in San Antonio. And THEN his (even more ! ) POS son takes over his LEGACY seat ( think KENNEDY"S, you non-Texans ) only for the son to resign to get Joaquin Castro ( yes, the POS TWIN brother to the current HUD Secretary and former San Antonio fag-loving, street car loving, tax-and-spend, Mayor and Obamite loving "progressive-and-current-Shrillary shadow Julian Castro ! Just the kinda POS that Lil Cotex, assup and the rest of the reach around crew will be wanting blow-up dolls made of !!!!!

[CuteOldGuy]

Originally Posted by ExNYer

Jews, right?

Fuck you for that. I never said that, nor did I imply that. You are way off track.

[LexusLover]

Originally Posted by Rey Lengua

Ahhhh...ole Henry B ....

LBJ/Daniel/Connally Democrats.

Putting politics aside, Charlie is a pretty nice guy. Perhaps grouchier as he gets older.

[DSK]

Originally Posted by Rey Lengua

Ahhhh...ole Henry B ( as in Bob Oso ! ) Gonzales... and fuck a lota RIP for THAT friggen socialist/communist MOFO that tried to impeach Ronald Regan and has a convection center named after his socialist liberal ass here in San Antonio. And THEN his (even more ! ) POS son takes over his LEGACY seat ( think KENNEDY"S, you non-Texans ) only for the son to resign to get Joaquin Castro ( yes, the POS TWIN brother to the current HUD Secretary and former San Antonio fag-loving, street car loving, tax-and-spend, Mayor and Obamite loving "progressive-and-current-Shrillary shadow Julian Castro ! Just the kinda POS that Lil Cotex, assup and the rest of the reach around crew will be wanting blow-up dolls made of !!!!!

Henry B Gonzales was fat, ugly, and stupid. I hated him.

[LexusLover]

[QUOTE=DSK;1057829105]Henry B Gonzales was fat, ugly, and stupid.QUOTE]

He was "tuned" into the South Texas banking though, and intimately acquainted with the Carrizo Springs "powers to be" .. et al, ... which included Duval County.

[nwarounder]

You can't legislate stupidity. Break them up and they just come back as a bunch of smaller ones, still all controlled by the same people, very smart people. Stupid people will always lose their money to smart people. Why do you think spam email is still around? Because stupid people click on the links, and they always will because someone smarter than them designed it that way. The "big banks" are no different, they design their business around taking money from the stupid people that don't actually read or are unable to comprehend what they are investing in.

If you want them gone, just get all the retards to quit giving them their money.

[Tsmokies]

We taxpayers had to bail out a lot of shit after Cheney/bush started the stupid wars and destroyed our economy. Kinda like regan bush did before Bill took over

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by ExNYer

There's no irony in it at all.

You wouldn't know IRONY if it punched you in the nose.


Your right to swing your arm in the air ends where my nose begins. So your freedom is limited by actions causing harm to me. Every libertarian agrees with that.

Oh, my! Did Jamie Dimon take a swing at you? I wish I'd seen that. How did anyone on Wall Street cause you direct personal harm? Are you one of those fucking tort lawyers who is always looking for some tortured reasons to sue the deepest pockets you can blame for every setback in life? Lemme guess... did you lose money in the 2008/09 stock market decline? And you want to pin that on Jamie Dimon? Because - why? No one ever told you stocks are risky and can go down in price? Who did you blame when stocks tanked after the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000? Which companies did you demand to be broken up after the market crashed in 1987?

Or maybe you were harmed because the 2008/09 recession hurt your business? Was that Jamie Dimon's fault too? Did someone tell you the business cycle has been eliminated? If so, they lied. Did you likewise find a handy scapegoat to blame for the 2001 recession? Or the one in 1991? Or the one in 1982?

And you say “every libertarian agrees” with you. Does COG speak for every libertarian? He wants to abolish the Fed, which was created back in 1913 to help modulate the business cycle. That means he wants to go back to an economy where recessions are longer, deeper and more frequent. Which means a lot more pain for your portfolio and your business. You could say COG wants to make it easier for you to get punched in the nose – harder and more often. See any irony yet? Your entire analysis is full of it!


The big investment banks (i.e., Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo) aren't real persons like you and me - they are creatures of the law, in particular, corporate law. They got that big because mergers and acquisitions approved by government MADE them that big. And, of course, they use their HUGE financial resources to bribe both parties to leave them alone and allow them to reap huge profits. They even draft legislation on behalf of legislators to make it even easier for them to introduce bills.

First, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo aren't investment banks. They're commercial banks. You obviously weren't paying attention during the 2008/09 crisis. Every big independent investment bank on Wall Street either merged into a commercial bank, converted to one, or (in the case of Lehman) failed. Secondly, what is your point about banks being “creatures of … corporate law”? Every business in the US has to choose a corporate entity form (partnership, LLC, etc.) before it opens its doors - so what? That doesn't mean the Government did them a favor. In case you've forgotten, we still have a (largely) free enterprise economy - where the private sector is free to produce the goods and services people actually want, while the government leeches off their output, not vice versa.

Thirty years ago there were 14,500 commercial banks in the US. Today we're down to 5,500. You completely ignore the huge economies of scale that drove this industry consolidation (especially in back-office IT systems) and its obvious benefits to consumers. Who the fuck needs 14,500 banks? Or even 5,500 banks? Canada has only 29, dominated by the Big 5 chartered banks. Their banking system sailed smoothly through the 2008/09 financial crisis and is regarded as one of the safest in the world. Go study them before you glibly jump to the conclusion it's a good idea to have the government bust up all the big US banks.

Oh, and you contradicted yourself. First you say the banks “bribe” politicians to “leave them alone.” Then in the next breath you complain about how busy they are drafting new legislation affecting their industry. Do they want to be left alone or not? Make up your mind before you go on a rant.


But they have made themselves so big that if they fail they cause massive harm to the economy, including ME. I don't have to sit idly by while they swing their arm and hope they don't hit me in the nose. At some point, enormous financial institutions become a threat to everyone's financial well-being. And it is NOT because they are a natural monopoly (like Microsoft used to be) that came into being because everybody wanted what they were selling.

For a tort lawyer, you're not very good at proving damages. Again, I didn't see Jamie Dimon swinging at anyone, let alone you. But I'll venture a guess that you're referring to subprime mortgages. So you want to break up the banks because a few of them were stupid enough to follow Barney Frank's diktat and lower their underwriting standards so that more poor and credit-challenged Americans could realize the dream of owning their own homes? WTF is wrong with those idiot bankers! Why didn't they just thumb their noses at Barney Frank and say we don't give a fuck about helping poor and credit-challenged Americans? They deserve every punishment in the book! The problem isn't Barney Frank, it's that the banks are just too damn big! Uh-huh, that makes perfect sense.

You fail to explain how or why bigness per se is “a threat to everyone's financial well-being.” Asserting it doesn't make it true. Canadian banks are huge and threaten no one. And by the way - Microsoft was never a “natural monopoly”. You need to look up how economists define that term. You do understand that being a “natural monopoly” is an argument for more government regulation. So the fact that you admit banking is not a natural monopoly argues in favor of less regulation, not more.


If a $100 billion big bank is broken up into ten $10 billion small banks, every shareholder gets stock in the new banks of equal value. No one loses money, so there is no "taking" that violates the takings clause of the Constitution. If you don't want stock in one or more of the smaller companies, you can always sell it and get your money back.

That works out nice and cleanly, doesn't it? Kinda like King Solomon splitting the baby in half? You do realize that the only times the US government has done this in our history it was for compelling anti-trust reasons (Standard Oil, AT&T). Now you want to give the government the power to do it anytime you or some other asshole with an agenda says he feels vaguely threatened? I personally feel much more threatened by your cavalier willingness to expand the government's already chilling and far-reaching economic/regulatory over-reach than I will ever feel threatened by Jamie Dimon! You are a small-government libertarian's worst nightmare!


But the smaller banks now compete with each other rather than cooperate with each other to rig the system. If the top 5-6 biggest investment banks are broken up into 40, 50 or 60 smaller ones it will be far harder for them to come to any kind of sweetheart arrangements with Congress and among themselves.

Again, you need to learn the difference between investment and commercial banking. And you don't understand how banks compete. Regulators don't approve bank mergers without ensuring they don't reduce retail (branch) competition. When it comes to underwriting and trading (i.e. the investment banking side), your argument fails completely. Those activities require a shitload of capital. If you break up the large US banks, the remnants won't have enough capital to compete for such business with Deutsche Bank or HSBC. You will be telling every US company that needs to raise money on Wall Street that they have to go to a foreign institution to get the job done.


They compete, their profit margins are thinner so they have less cash to throw around at Congress. And the cost of their services is lowered, so consumers gain. And if 2, 3, 4 or 5 of them fail, there are still 40-50 left to provide financial services.

Simplistic nonsense. You completely ignore economies of scale (which benefit consumers) and capital requirements. Break up the big US banks and foreign banks would immediately jump in and scoop up all of the underwriting and trading business on Wall Street. Less competition to underwrite new stock/bond issues would fatten the profit margins of foreign banks at everyone else's expense. Is that what you want?

We all gain by the removal of a common threat.

No, we all suffer because you want to replace a vague and mis-diagnosed threat with a far more worrisome real one (over-reaching government). And splitting up 10 big banks into 100 small ones won't make the next financial panic/credit freeze less likely.


A financial oligarchy is a threat to my liberty, too. Not just big government. Because they usually go hand-in-hand in reducing people's freedom and threatening their financial well-being.

Now you sound like COG. Reduced to whiny bumper-sticker slogans. Pathetic.


And the big banks were not exactly strong-armed (not "stiff armed") into buying the assets of the failing banks.

Yes, they were. It's well documented. They were ambivalent at best. BofA wanted to back out of the Merrill Lynch merger in Dec. 2008 and was coerced into completing it.


First, the liquidity crisis was threatening to take THEM down, too.

That's where the Fed proved its usefulness - LOLR. Maybe you can explain it to COG sometime.


They wanted the government to provide a safety net for them also.

Nope. If you're referring to the TARP money, the only bank that wanted it was Citibank. I explained all of this a year ago during a previous discussion in this forum:

The government let them buy the assets on the cheap and underwrote their risk.

You are clueless how this works. The amount you have to pay for a distressed public company is determined by the stock price – not by the government letting you buy it on the cheap. And if the buyer doesn't have enough time to do a proper due diligence, such an acquisition can easily blow up and cost much more in the long run than any discount built into the purchase price.


The government also printed money willy nilly and handed it over to the banks.

You mean Quantitative Easing? That refers to the Fed's program for purchasing Treasury and mortgage-backed debt from banks and other holders of such securities. Not the same as printing money and handing it over to the banks.


You may recall that the big criticism of the banks in the early days of the financial crisis was that the banks took all of the government money and kept it as a hedge on their own positions rather than loan it out (the way the government expected) in order to get the economy jump-started fast. Yet another reason why the recovery has been so slow.

Yes, I recall that incredibly stupid criticism leveled against the banks. The critics either didn't know or didn't care how dumb they sounded. They knew most people would simply nod their heads in agreement. First they beat up the banks for reckless lending, then they turned around and beat up the banks for not lending enough. In other words, if you are a bank, you can't win no matter what you do. Are you really too stupid to see how inconsistent that is? In your expert opinion, what specific “positions” were the banks “hedging” with the TARP money? If you knew what you were talking about, you would understand the TARP money wasn't supposed to stimulate new lending (which always contracts during a recession) – it was to make the banks' balance sheets look stronger during a global financial panic. And once again, most of the banks didn't ask for it, didn't want it, and afterwards couldn't pay it back fast enough.


If you want to start reducing the power of government, you have to start by reducing the power of the government's handmaidens. Although some may reasonably say it is government that is the handmaiden of the banks.

And Jamie Dimon is the master puppeteer! And your go-to guy to blame whenever life punches you in the nose!

What a disappointment... I thought you were one of the few intelligent posters here, ExNYer. You've swallowed the false, agenda-driven libtard narrative on the 2008/09 financial crisis hook, line and sinker. And then you insult everyone's intelligence by saying this libtard narrative is consistent with Libertarianism. Go play with COG. Then vote for Bernie Sanders. He's your man. He'll break up the banks and take a wrecking ball to the rest of the US economy too.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

The truth is out there, but you won't find it in government reports or establishment media. You people need to get a grip. The government is no longer here to serve you, they are here to control you. And they are very good at it. You've all fallen into line. Too bad.... you're smarter than that. Look behind the curtain and see who's running the show.

As Chris Christie would say:

"There it is, there it is, folks! COG's memorized 25-second speech!"

Any suggestions on how to shrink it to bumper-sticker size?

[CuteOldGuy]

Originally Posted by lustylad

As Chris Christie would say:

"There it is, there it is, folks! COG's memorized 25-second speech!"

Any suggestions on how to shrink it to bumper-sticker size?

Is that really the best you got? That's sad. Well, just keep trusting the government. We'll see how that works out for you.

[DSK]

Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy

Is that really the best you got? That's sad. Well, just keep trusting the government. We'll see how that works out for you.

Spell it out for us, please.

Let's say we get a real audit, unlike what we have now. I'm all for it.

What crimes do you see having been committed? What are they hiding?