Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Joan Denoo on May 12, 2012 at 3:39pm

That is why J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, should not be allowed to have access to savings and loan banks and have no say in how they are to be regulated. Every homeowner who holds a mortgage that is underwater needs to coalesce and seek your common interests. The middle class USA citizens needs to stand tall and firm on this issue, make a lot of noise if necessary, boycott, march, sit-in, and whatever it takes to make our government put limits on what can and cannot be done with this important banking system.
If some want to speculate and take risks, form another system of casino, speculative banking and let them have at it with no guarantees from taxpayer money. As long as their banks have guarantees, they do not take the risks, they dump the risk on taxpayers and get away with it. 

DJIA 2012-05-12

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on May 12, 2012 at 3:48pm

Thanks I had heard something about JP Morgan and the banks failing. Maybe the bank system needs to be restructured and broken up.

Permalink Reply by Joan Denoo on May 12, 2012 at 7:22pm

There are many calling for radical change in the banking system. These include:

Joseph Stiglitz, Steve Keene, Ann Pettifor, Robert Reich, James Galbraith, Amartya Sen, Michael Hudson, and Antonio Damasio, just to get you started on seeing what others are saying. 

Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)

Breaking Up Four Big Banks

"The proposition is simple: Too-big-to-fail banks should be made smaller, and preferably small enough to fail without causing global panic. This idea had been gathering momentum since the fall of 2008 and, while the Brown-Kaufman amendment originated on the Democratic side, support was beginning to appear across the aisle."

~Simon Johnson

How to Break Up the Banks

"Another financial crisis, a prolonged recession, or changing political ideologies could cause a re-examination of the status quo and lead to a decision to break up the big banks."

~ Roberta Karmel, a onetime Securities and Exchange Commissioner

"J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation's largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street's war against regulation ... said, 'The bets were "poorly executed" and "poorly monitored," "a result of many errors," "sloppiness," and "bad judgment." But not to worry. "We will admit it, we will fix it and move on."

~ How J.P. Morgan Chase Has Made the Case for Breaking Up the Big Ban...

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on May 12, 2012 at 9:25pm

As long as banks are allowed to lend money that they don't actually have in their vaults (they create it "out of the inkwell"...which is what caused the bank failures of the 1930s), we are all in deep doo-doo.  The only entity that should be allowed to create fiat money is the government itself.

I just finished re-reading Robert A. Heinlein's novel, For Us, the Living.     It isn't much of a novel, it's more of a lecture disguised as fiction. It was his first, written in 1939, and never published until after his death, but it has some interesting economic ideas.  Some seem way off base, but others will make you pause and think.  (ONE bank...The Bank of the United States, owned and operated by and for We the People...sounds communistic, doesn't it? But why should Wall Street get to make the rules?) Of course the financial lobbyists would die before allowing any of his suggestions to be enacted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Us,_the_Living

People have been screaming about the rise in gasoline prices for months...there is NO shortage of gasoline or crude oil (although we should be weaning ourselves off that ASAP); it's all due to commodity speculators.  Something needs to be done about that...maybe before people start building homemade Guillotines.

Enough is enough.

 

Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on May 16, 2012 at 11:16pm

Les Leopold explains the J.P. Morgan debacle in easy to understand language in

Don't Look Now -- Banks Are Still Ruining America: 6 Harsh Lessons ...

He agrees with some recommendations Joan and sk8eycat made, about the necessity of breaking up too big banks.

Permalink Reply by Joan Denoo on May 17, 2012 at 12:31pm

Ruth, excellent article! They state,

"The truth is that there are no good banks and bad banks among the giants of finance. That’s just a feel-good story that gives us false hope that individuals and individual institutions can fix a system that is rotten to the core."

INET just released its:

Best of Berlin by Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Play All

Each presenter makes more sense to me than any one of the people on Obama's advisory council 

If anyone can present a good argument defending present economic theory and practice, I would like to read it. 

Or if anyone can present a good argument against INET's ideas, please let me read it. 

Permalink Reply by sk8eycat on May 18, 2012 at 10:48am

I absolutely love Sen. Bernie Sanders! (but I don't know if this video will play....)

I wanted to make sure that you saw Bernie’s CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer this week talking about Wall Street and the need to break up the huge financial institutions that dominate our economy. Here’s an excerpt:

Click here to watch Bernie on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer

 

Bernie believes that at a time when the six largest financial institutions have assets worth $9 trillion, which is the equivalent of two-thirds of the GDP of the United States, and when the top six banks provide half of the mortgages in America and over two-thirds of the credit cards, it is clearly time to break them up.

Adding insult to injury, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase who recently presided over a $2 billion “goof," sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve, which is charged with regulating the banks.  Bernie will be introducing legislation next week to end this “fox guarding the hen house” situation.

Just wanted to keep you up to date on Bernie’s work taking on Wall Street.

Ben Eisenberg
Friends of Bernie Sanders