Forum Post: If We Break Up the Giants, Smaller Banks Will Thrive … And Loan More to Main Street
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 7, 2011, 6:45 p.m. EST by MonetizingDiscontent
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If We Break Up the Giants, Smaller Banks Will Thrive … And Loan More to Main Street
Banks receiving government aid cut loans
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2010-04-21-tarp-banks_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
Banks that received federal assistance during the financial crisis reduced lending more aggressively and gave bigger pay raises to employees than institutions that didn’t get aid, a USA TODAY/American University review found.
H.R.2451: Glass-Steagall Restoration Act of 2011 Find it here: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php
Write to your members in Congress and demand that they co-sponsor this bill. NOW!
Senate: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
House: http://www.house.gov/representatives/
The Congress that Crashed America http://home.ptd.net/~aahpat/aandc/congcrash.html A directory of 64 current U.S. Senators & 171 sitting Representatives who repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999.
Kick these cretins out of Congress for the economic security of the nation. Confronting these creeps in their districts and getting them out of the Congress is the best way to drive the point home that America is serious about reinstating Glass-Steagall. With them gone the opposition to responsible regulation of the banks will be significantly reduced.
Since the government is not inclined to reduce the size of the big banks and make them systemically safe, small enough to fail without major harm to innocent people, the best recourse I have seen is the OWS action to get folks to move their deposits out of the major banks. This effectively reduces the size of the banks making them less dangerous to us all.
Congratulations and two thumbs up to whoever in the movement came up with that idea. (;^>)
Hi aahpat.
yep, moving our money out of the Too Big To Saves was a surgeons move. There are so many ways to effect change, by voting with your debt-dollar. We are the ones propping everything up. Without our consent the unpopular corprations and dirty banks are nothing. We can drive all their stock prices to zero, by not buying their widgets, and by choosing to bank smarter.
Key Lesson From Iceland Crisis: “Let Banks Fail”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/key-lesson-from-iceland-crisis-let-banks-fail.html
What Iceland Teaches Us: “Let Banks Fail”
Agence France-Presse notes:
http://news.yahoo.com/key-lesson-iceland-crisis-let-banks-fail-003849604.html "...Three years after Iceland’s banks collapsed and the country teetered on the brink, its economy is recovering, proof that governments should let failing lenders go bust and protect taxpayers, analysts say."
Hard evidence: bailed-out banks take more risk
http://financeaddict.com/2011/11/hard-evidence-bailed-out-banks-take-more-risk/
Politicians, Treasury Secretaries, etc. would have you believe that “moral hazard” is something we should only worry about in the abstract, in the future, when they’ve moved on to another job. But now a study confirms with hard facts: moral hazard–it lives.
Researchers have asked for some time whether and how bailouts might affect banks’ risk-taking. Would they run wild, aware of the high likelihood of being bailed out again if they ran into trouble? Or would they ease off precisely because they’d now be assured of lower financing costs and long-term survival, and therefore would want to avoid doing anything that might cause regulators to take that valuable banking license away? More daring or more discipline?
Each of these camps had its underpinnings yet the question was a difficult one to study. Why? Because, generally speaking, the developed Western countries didn’t really do bank bail-outs. [Insert smirk here.]
But then came 2008 and its bailout-palooza. And so, thanks to hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and an alphabet-soup of bank welfare programs, this question can now benefit from the availability of real-life, empirical data. (Cloud, silver lining and all that.)
Continue Reading The Rest Here:
http://financeaddict.com/2011/11/hard-evidence-bailed-out-banks-take-more-risk/
Just make sure you do your homework. Many smaller banks are, in fact, owned by the big boys.
yes, very good point.
And no banks would have the political power to own the government. Too great of concentration of economic power is automatically anti-democratic.
'Howtodoit' Is organizing a march to Capitol Hill to REINSTATE the Glass-Steagall Act ((Good stuff))
http://occupywallst.org/forum/its-time-for-a-million-people-march-to-capitol-hil/