Forum Post: Demand Suggestion - from Automatic Earth Blog on Oct. 6th

"The Occupy movement needs more attainable goals if it is to succeed and survive. The anger is there, as is the energy, but the focus does not seem to be. So I wanted to make a first suggestion; I’ll have more going forward. It's perfectly defensible for a government to lend money to a bank in trouble that is important to its economy, in order to try and save. However, it borders on criminal negligence, if it isn't outright criminal behavior, to lend that money without being perfectly aware of what assets that bank holds. A bank could have 100 times more debt than it receives in bail-out money. But we wouldn't know about that today, we're not allowed to know. Both the US (FASB 157) and the European Union (IFRS 9) have accounting (non-)principles in place that say it’s perfectly alright for a financial institution to hold assets in its books at 100 cents on the dollar that have a market value of 70% of that, or 50%, or even 5%. It has therefore no obligation to reveal even to its shareholders what its true financial situation is. In other words: a potentially viable solution to the crisis is frustrated by the banks. So far, so good (?!) A bank is after all a private institution and there should be limits to the power a government has over private companies (though measures should be taken to prevent a repeat of this bizarre situation). But it doesn't stop there, and this is where I suggest the Occupy movement(s) should come in. If a bank wants to sit on its debt, since revealing it would cause it great stress, that's fine, to an extent. Occupy (and us) can make sure FASB 157 and IFRS 9 are thrown out at a later date anyway. But a bank should never ever be allowed to sit on its debt and mark it to fantasy and then also receive funding from our governments, whether in bail-outs, hand-outs, loans, special facilities' windows at our central banks, or any other sort of funding, nothing of the kind. We need to tell our politicians that they can no longer give even one single penny of ours to any institution that hasn't marked all of its assets to market. No exceptions. We must demand this in order to prevent our money from being wasted on those banks that have no chance of recovery with the money we might give them. So how do you get politicians to force mark-to-market on banks that ask for loans and bail-outs? They're not going to do it voluntarily; or perhaps we should put it like this: they sure as hell ain't planning to do it. That means it will take an "organization" such as Occupy Wall Street, with all its "loose affilates" springing up around the world, to attempt to force them to change their minds and tacks. It's that simple, really." Read the entire post at http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/