<http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/41786-focus-extreme-vetting-
but-not-for-banks>
Taibbi writes: "Donald Trump, the man who positioned himself as the common
man's shield against Wall Street, signed a series of orders today calling
for reviews or rollbacks of financial regulations. He did so after meeting
with some friendly helpers."
Donald Trump signs an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010
Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform Friday. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/extreme-vetting-but-not-for-b
anks-w464966>
Extreme Vetting, but Not for Banks
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
05 February 17
Trump proves he is a tool for Wall Street after all
onald Trump, the man who positioned himself as the common man's shield
against Wall Street, signed a series of orders today calling for reviews or
rollbacks of financial regulations. He did so after meeting with some
friendly helpers.
Here's how CNBC described the crowd
<http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/03/trump-advisor-gary-cohn-everything-were-doin
g-is-to-promote-growth-and-job-creation.html> of Wall Street CEOs Trump
received, before he ordered a review of both the Dodd-Frank Act and the
fiduciary rule requiring investment advisors to act in their clients'
interests:
"Trump also will meet at the White House with leading CEOs, including
JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, and BlackRock's Larry
Fink."
Leading the way for this assortment of populist heroes will be former
Goldman honcho Gary Cohn, now Trump's chief economic advisor.
Dimon, Schwarzman, Fink and Cohn collectively represent a rogues gallery of
the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash. It would be hard to put
together a group of people less sympathetic to the non-wealthy.
Trump's approach to Wall Street is in sharp contrast to his tough-talking
stances on terrorism. He talks a big game when slamming the door on
penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have
more money than he does.
The two primary disasters in American history this century (if we're not
counting Trump's election) have been 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis,
which cost 8.7 million people their jobs
<https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm> and may have destroyed as
much as 45 percent of the world's wealth
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackstone-idUSTRE52966Z20090310> .
The response to 9/11 we know: major military actions all over the world,
plus a radical reshaping of our legal structure, with voters embracing
warrantless surveillance, a suspension of habeas corpus, even torture.
But the crisis response? Basically, we gave trillions of dollars to bail out
the very actors who caused the mess. Now, with Trump's election, we've
triumphantly put those same actors back in charge of non-policing
themselves.
In between, we passed a few weak-sauce rules designed to scale back some of
the worst excesses. Those rules presumably will be tossed aside now.
Trump's "extreme vetting" plan for immigrants and refugees is based upon a
safety argument - i.e., that the smallest chance of a disaster justifies the
most extreme measures. Infamously this week, administration spokesdunce
Kellyanne Conway resorted to citing a disaster that never even happened
<https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/03/kellyanne-conway-says-false-bow
ling-green-massacre-claim-was-honest-mistake/21706547/> - the "Bowling
Green Massacre" - as a justification for the crazy visa policy.
This makes Trump's embrace of the Mortgage Crash Dream Team as his advisory
panel for how to make Wall Street run more smoothly all the more
preposterous.
The crisis was caused by the financial equivalent of open borders. Virtually
no one was monitoring risk levels or credit worthiness at the world's
biggest companies.
The watchdogs who are supposed to be making sure the morons on Wall Street
don't blow up the planet all failed: the compliance people within private
companies, the so-called self-regulating organizations like the NYSE, and
finally the government agencies like the OCC and the OTS.
These companies are now so enormous that they can't keep track of their own
positions. Also, in sharp contrast to the propaganda about what brainy
people they all are, many of them lack even the most basic understanding of
the potential consequences of deals they might be making.
The leadership of AIG, for instance, basically had no clue
<https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf> how its
derivatives portfolio worked, despite the fact that they had $79 billion
worth of exposure. Similarly, then-CEO Chuck Prince of Citigroup told the
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that a $40 billion mortgage position
"would not in any way have excited my attention." Both companies ended up
needing massive bailouts.
Not only can they not keep track of their own books, they already blow off
regulators whenever they get the chance. Take JPMorgan Chase's "London
Whale" episode, in which some $6.2 billion in losses
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-23/jpmorgan-s-london-whale-
surfaces-to-say-12-loss-not-his-fault> in one portfolio accumulated
practically overnight. In that case, Dimon simply refused to give the
federal regulators routine, required reports as to what was going on with
his bank's positions, probably because he himself had no idea how big the
hole was at the time.
"Mr. Dimon said it was his decision whether to send the reports to the OCC,"
a regulator later told the Senate
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/15/jp-morgan-jamie-dimon
-heidi-moore> .
This is the same Jamie Dimon about whom Trump said today, "There's nobody
better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie Dimon, so thank you, Jamie."
The enduring lesson of the financial crisis is that in markets as complex as
this one, the most extreme danger is in opacity. The big problem is that
these egomaniacal Wall Street titans want markets as opaque as possible.
This is why they want to get rid of the fiduciary rule, because they don't
think it's anyone's business if they choose to bet against their clients (as
Cohn's Goldman famously did), or overcharge them, or otherwise screw them.
They don't want to have to submit
<https://www.bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Financial%20Reform%20News
letter%201-27-2017_0.pdf> to even the most basic capital requirements, or
be classified a systemically important company, or have to keep their
depository businesses separate from their gambling businesses, or have to
have a plan for dissolution if they melt down, or really deal with any
intrusions at all.
Trump - a man who doesn't want you to see what's going on underneath his
hair, let alone in his books - naturally sympathizes with Wall Street's
efforts to keep the markets opaque. The obvious conclusion is that these
orders will eventually lead us back to ballooning risk, overheated markets
(the NYSE is already soaring) and speculative bubbles.
If we're very lucky, it won't crash soon. But can we at least put an end to
the "drain the swamp" nonsense?
<http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize>
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Donald Trump signs an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010
Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform Friday. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/extreme-vetting-but-not-for-ba
nks-w464966http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/extreme-vetting-but
-not-for-banks-w464966
Extreme Vetting, but Not for Banks
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
05 February 17
Trump proves he is a tool for Wall Street after all
onald Trump, the man who positioned himself as the common man's shield
against Wall Street, signed a series of orders today calling for reviews or
rollbacks of financial regulations. He did so after meeting with some
friendly helpers.
Here's how CNBC described the crowd
<http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/03/trump-advisor-gary-cohn-everything-were-doin
g-is-to-promote-growth-and-job-creation.html> of Wall Street CEOs Trump
received, before he ordered a review of both the Dodd-Frank Act and the
fiduciary rule requiring investment advisors to act in their clients'
interests:
"Trump also will meet at the White House with leading CEOs, including
JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, and BlackRock's Larry
Fink."
Leading the way for this assortment of populist heroes will be former
Goldman honcho Gary Cohn, now Trump's chief economic advisor.
Dimon, Schwarzman, Fink and Cohn collectively represent a rogues gallery of
the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash. It would be hard to put
together a group of people less sympathetic to the non-wealthy.
Trump's approach to Wall Street is in sharp contrast to his tough-talking
stances on terrorism. He talks a big game when slamming the door on
penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have
more money than he does.
The two primary disasters in American history this century (if we're not
counting Trump's election) have been 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis,
which cost 8.7 million people their jobs
<https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm> and may have destroyed as
much as 45 percent of the world's wealth
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackstone-idUSTRE52966Z20090310> .
The response to 9/11 we know: major military actions all over the world,
plus a radical reshaping of our legal structure, with voters embracing
warrantless surveillance, a suspension of habeas corpus, even torture.
But the crisis response? Basically, we gave trillions of dollars to bail out
the very actors who caused the mess. Now, with Trump's election, we've
triumphantly put those same actors back in charge of non-policing
themselves.
In between, we passed a few weak-sauce rules designed to scale back some of
the worst excesses. Those rules presumably will be tossed aside now.
Trump's "extreme vetting" plan for immigrants and refugees is based upon a
safety argument - i.e., that the smallest chance of a disaster justifies the
most extreme measures. Infamously this week, administration spokesdunce
Kellyanne Conway resorted to citing a disaster that never even happened
<https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/03/kellyanne-conway-says-false-bow
ling-green-massacre-claim-was-honest-mistake/21706547/> - the "Bowling
Green Massacre" - as a justification for the crazy visa policy.
This makes Trump's embrace of the Mortgage Crash Dream Team as his advisory
panel for how to make Wall Street run more smoothly all the more
preposterous.
The crisis was caused by the financial equivalent of open borders. Virtually
no one was monitoring risk levels or credit worthiness at the world's
biggest companies.
The watchdogs who are supposed to be making sure the morons on Wall Street
don't blow up the planet all failed: the compliance people within private
companies, the so-called self-regulating organizations like the NYSE, and
finally the government agencies like the OCC and the OTS.
These companies are now so enormous that they can't keep track of their own
positions. Also, in sharp contrast to the propaganda about what brainy
people they all are, many of them lack even the most basic understanding of
the potential consequences of deals they might be making.
The leadership of AIG, for instance, basically had no clue
<https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf> how its
derivatives portfolio worked, despite the fact that they had $79 billion
worth of exposure. Similarly, then-CEO Chuck Prince of Citigroup told the
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that a $40 billion mortgage position
"would not in any way have excited my attention." Both companies ended up
needing massive bailouts.
Not only can they not keep track of their own books, they already blow off
regulators whenever they get the chance. Take JPMorgan Chase's "London
Whale" episode, in which some $6.2 billion in losses
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-23/jpmorgan-s-london-whale-
surfaces-to-say-12-loss-not-his-fault> in one portfolio accumulated
practically overnight. In that case, Dimon simply refused to give the
federal regulators routine, required reports as to what was going on with
his bank's positions, probably because he himself had no idea how big the
hole was at the time.
"Mr. Dimon said it was his decision whether to send the reports to the OCC,"
a regulator later told the Senate
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/15/jp-morgan-jamie-dimon
-heidi-moore> .
This is the same Jamie Dimon about whom Trump said today, "There's nobody
better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie Dimon, so thank you, Jamie."
The enduring lesson of the financial crisis is that in markets as complex as
this one, the most extreme danger is in opacity. The big problem is that
these egomaniacal Wall Street titans want markets as opaque as possible.
This is why they want to get rid of the fiduciary rule, because they don't
think it's anyone's business if they choose to bet against their clients (as
Cohn's Goldman famously did), or overcharge them, or otherwise screw them.
They don't want to have to submit
<https://www.bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Financial%20Reform%20News
letter%201-27-2017_0.pdf> to even the most basic capital requirements, or
be classified a systemically important company, or have to keep their
depository businesses separate from their gambling businesses, or have to
have a plan for dissolution if they melt down, or really deal with any
intrusions at all.
Trump - a man who doesn't want you to see what's going on underneath his
hair, let alone in his books - naturally sympathizes with Wall Street's
efforts to keep the markets opaque. The obvious conclusion is that these
orders will eventually lead us back to ballooning risk, overheated markets
(the NYSE is already soaring) and speculative bubbles.
If we're very lucky, it won't crash soon. But can we at least put an end to
the "drain the swamp" nonsense?
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socializehttp://e-max.it/posizioname
nto-siti-web/socialize
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