How Glass-Steagall Crashed the 2016 Conventions

And pay close attention if this is mention on the campaign trail with Clinton-Kaine and Trump-Pence… Stay tuned…

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was an unexpected and prominent part of the Democratic and Republican conventions this year, as both parties added a call to reinstate the law as part of their party platforms. But that will be easier said than done, considering that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have shown little interest in the idea. Following is a look at how a Depression-era law found its way to Cleveland and Philadelphia. READ MORE »

GOP platform of reinstating Glass-Steagall: Any problems of bank can be resolved through the bankruptcy code

Slate:

On Monday morning, Republican convention organizers handed out draft text of the platform, and the section on banking includes nothing on bringing back Glass-Steagall. Instead, it spends a lot of time calling on Congress to curtail the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s powers, then says:

Republicans believe that no financial institution is too big to fail. We support legislation to ensure that the problems of any financial institution can be resolved through the bankruptcy code. [Note: Dodd-Frank has this. It’s called the living will provision.] We endorse prudent regulation father banking system to ensure that FDIC-regulated banks are properly capitalized [Note: Dodd-Frank also has this] and taxpayers are protected on bailouts. We will end the government’s use of disparite impact theory in enforcing anti-discrimination laws with regard to lending.

And of course, the RNC blasted the final draft of the platform. Obviously, Paul Manafort, Trump’s top head minion, did think this through. Manafort stated that the Glass-Steagall bill needs to be brought back because Dodd-Frank has been a burden on small banks.

Do we need to prevent a repetition of the damage caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 according to Barney Frank?

“There is a fundamental weakness in the position of those who insist that the only way to deal with financial institutions that are “too big to fail” is to break them up: their acknowledgment that the central question of how big is “too big” is too hard to answer. This is rarely made explicit, but it is universal. Across the ideological range from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve, the “break ’em up” advocates scrupulously avoid suggesting any size beyond which banks must not be allowed to exist. The reason for this glaring omission — which renders their argument of little practical use for makers of actual decisions — is clear, once the focus is on the meaning of “too big to fail,” as opposed to its invocation as a general expression of distrust of banks. The issue is how to avoid a situation in which an institution has incurred so much debt that its inability to pay threatens the stability of the financial system. In other words, how do we prevent a repetition of the damage caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008? Therein lies their dilemma.”–Former Congressman Barney Frank

Source: Deal Breaker

By Biloxi

Congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton supporter, has been in the media these days to discuss why Hillary Clinton would make a better President than Senator Senators. But, I paid more attention to his take on how Clinton would take on Wall Street and how to strengthen the Dodd-Frank law. Currently, the Volcker rule, rule in the Dodd-Frank bill and named after Paul Volcker (former Fed chief) restrict US banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments such as trade on the bank’s own accounts that don’t benefit their customers,were to go into effect in April 2014. However, thanks to bank lobbyists and the big banks, the Volcker rule has been pushed into 2017. I started to listen to Congressman Frank’s statement on too big to fail, how to take on Wall Street, and Lehman Brothers.

Here is Frank’s take on Sanders’ too big to fail argument in an interview on PBS:

JEFFREY BROWN: And we get a response now from one of the leading players in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Barney Frank served as a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts from 1981 until his retirement in 2013. As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he played a lead role in crafting the Dodd-Frank law, which enacted the most sweeping changes to U.S. financial regulation since the Great Depression.
Welcome back to you.
The starting point of the critique we have heard is that the banks are bigger than ever, the potential for another bailout remains strong. Dodd-Frank was a start, but didn’t go nearly far enough.
Do you see a different picture?
FORMER REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), Massachusetts: Oh, very much so.
In the first place, both Senator Sanders and Mr. Kashkari continue to evade the biggest question. That is, how big is too big? The crisis which touched off when Lehman Brothers couldn’t make its payment, Lehman Brothers was about $650 billion in assets. We have banks four and five times that size
And the question is, does everybody have to be smaller than Lehman Brothers is today? But that would have consequences. Getting there would be a problem. By the way, it should be very clear, Glass-Steagall doesn’t do it. There is a disconnect between Senator Sanders insisting that the banks be broken down to the point where they won’t by their own size threaten, if they have too much debt, to undermine it.
And Glass-Steagall — Glass-Steagall would reduce — it wouldn’t do anything to Goldman Sachs and to Morgan Stanley, which are almost Glass-Steagall-ized themselves. But looked at Citicorp, or J.P. Morgan Chase, or Bank of America, Wells Fargo, even if they were subject to Glass-Steagall, they would still be well beyond the size that Lehman Brothers was.
There is just a disconnect between saying we’re going to do Glass-Steagall and getting the banks down to a size where, if there was a complete failure, you would get damaged by it.

I found a partial transcript of William K. Black’s testimony on the failure of Lehman Brothers before the House Financial Services Committee in 2010:

CHAIRMAN KANJORSKI: And now we’ll hear from Mr. William K. Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, the University of Missouri, Kansas City School of Law. Mr. Black.

BILL BLACK: Members of the Committee, thank you.

You asked earlier for a stern regulator, you have one now in front of you. And we need to be blunt. You haven’t heard much bluntness in hours of testimony.

We stopped a nonprime crisis before it became a crisis in 1991 by supervisory actions.

We did it so effectively that people forgot that it even existed, even though it caused several hundred million dollars of losses — but none to the taxpayer. We did it by preemptive litigation, and by supervision. We broke a raging epidemic of accounting control fraud without new legislation in the period of 1984 through 1986.

Legislation would’ve been helpful, we sought legislation, but we didn’t get it. And we were able to stop that because we didn’t simply consider business as usual.

Lehman’s failure is a story in large part of fraud. And it is fraud that begins at the absolute latest in 2001, and that is with their subprime and liars’ loan operations.

Lehman was the leading purveyor of liars’ loans in the world. For most of this decade, studies of liars’ loans show incidence of fraud of 90%. Lehmans sold this to the world, with reps and warranties that there were no such frauds. If you want to know why we have a global crisis, in large part it is before you. But it hasn’t been discussed today, amazingly.

Financial institution leaders are not engaged in risk when they engage in liars’ loans — liars’ loans will cause a failure. They lose money. The only way to make money is to deceive others by selling bad paper, and that will eventually lead to liability and failure as well.

When people cheat you cannot as a regulator continue business as usual. They go into a different category and you must act completely differently as a regulator. What we’ve gotten instead are sad excuses.

The SEC: we’re told they’re only 24 people in their comprehensive program. Who decided how many people there would be in their comprehensive program? Who decided the staffing? The SEC did. To say that we only had 24 people is not to create an excuse — it’s to give an admission of criminal negligence. Except it’s not criminal, because you’re a federal employee.

In the context of the FDIC, Secretary Geithner testified today that this pushed the financial system to the brink of collapse But Chairman Bernanke testified we sent two people to be on site at Lehman. We sent fiftycredit people to the largest savings and loan in America. It had 30 billion in assets. We had a whole lot less staff than the Fed does.

We forced out the CEO. We replaced the CEO. We did that not through regulation but because of our leverage as creditors. Now I ask you, who had more leverage as creditors in 2008? The Fed, as compared to the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, 19 years earlier? Incomprehensible greater leverage in the Fed, and it simply was not used.

Let’s start with the repos. We have known since the Enron in 2001 that this is a common scam, in which every major bank that was approached by Enron agreed to help them deceive creditors and investors by doing these kind of transactions.

And so what happened? There was a proposal in 2004 to stop it. And the regulatory heads — there was an interagency effort — killed it. They came out with something pathetic in 2006, and stalled its implication until 2007, but it ‘s meaningless.

We have known for decades that these are frauds. We have known for a decade how to stop them. All of the major regulatory agencies were complicit in that statement, in destroying it. We have a self-fulfilling policy of regulatory failure
because of the leadership in this era.

We have the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, finding that this is three card monty. Well what would you do, as a regulator, if you knew that one of the largest enterprises in the world, when the nation is on the brink of economic collapse, is engaged in fraud, three card monty? Would you continue business as usual?

That’s what was done. Oh they met a lot — they say “we only had a nuclear stick.” Sounds like a pretty good stick to use, if you’re on the brink of collapse of the system. But that’s not what the Fed has to do. The Fed is a central bank. Central banks for centuries have gotten rid of the heads of financial institutions. The Bank of England does it with a luncheon. The board of directors are invited. They don’t say “no.” They are sat down.

The head of the Bank of England says “we have lost confidence in the head of your enterprise. We believe Mr. Jones would be an effective replacement. And by 4 o’clock that day, Mr. Jones is running the place. And he has a mandate to clean up all the problems.

Instead, every day that Lehman remained under its leadership, the exposure of the American people to loss grew by hundreds of millions of dollars on average. Auroroa was pumping out up to 300 billion dollars a month in liars’ loans. Losses on those are running roughly 50% to 85 cents on the dollar. It is critical not to do business as usual, to change.

We’ve also heard from Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke — we couldn’t deal with these lenders because we had no authority over them. The Fed had unique authority since 1994 under HOEPA to regulate all mortgage lenders. It finally used it in 2008.

They could’ve stopped Aurora. They could’ve stopped the subprime unit of Lehman that was really a liar’s loan place as well as time went by.

[Kanjorski bangs the gavel]

Thank you very much.

HOEPA stands for Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act. Black is right. Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act was a bill in 1994 under Bill Clinton not only required certain disclosures and clamps restrictions on lenders of high-cost loans but gave Fed boards broad powers to adjust regulations as it sees fit.And Alan Greenspan failed to use his powers when the subprime mortgages became apparent in 2005:

Greenspan has tried to defend himself repeatedly, though as bank after bank has failed he’s retreated to the shadows. But in a 2007 interview with CBS he admitted: “While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late.” 

 

And here is more on the prepared testimony of William K. Black to House Financial Services Committee hearing:

Lehman senior management, however, responded to problems of fraud and unethical behaviour by cranking up the volume of liar’s loans by Aurora and BNC Mortgage (which specialized in subprime loans).

Lehman had become the only vertically integrated player in the industry, doing everything from making loans to securitizing them for sale to investors.

***

Lehman was a dominant player on all sides of the business. Through its subsidiaries – Aurora, BNC Mortgage LLC and Finance America – it was one of the 10 largest mortgage lenders in the U.S. The subsidiaries fed nearly all their loans to Lehman, making it one of the largest issuers of mortgage-backed securities. In 2007, Lehman securitized more than $100-billion worth of residential mortgages.

These demands posed a much larger problem: contagion. Because these CDOs were thinly traded, many of them did not yet reflect the loss in value implied by their crumbling mortgage holdings. If Bear Stearns or its lenders began auctioning these CDOs off, and nobody wanted to buy them, prices would plummet, requiring all banks with mortgage exposure to begin adjusting their books with massive writedowns.

Lehman, despite its huge mortgage exposure, appeared less scathed than some. Mr. Fuld was awarded $35-million in total compensation at the end of the year.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/article703526.ece

Volume of liar’s loans and subprime was everything – as long as Lehman could sell the liar’s loans to other parties. Volume created immense real losses, but it also maximized Mr. Fuld’s compensation. Aurora was originating more than $3 billion a month of such loans in the first half of 2007.

Lehman’s real estate businesses helped sales in the capital markets unit jump 56 percent from 2004 to 2006, faster than from investment banking or asset management, the company said in a filing. Lehman reported record earnings in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aVZKah.at5fY

And as for former Lehman CEO, he never mentioned the firm’s huge investment in subprime lending in the former CEO’s testimony to Congress in 2008. From Public Integrity website:

 Lehman CEO Richard Fuld, in congressional testimony following Lehman’s collapse, did not mention the firm’s huge investment in subprime lending and said the bank was a “casualty of the crisis of confidence” in the banking system.

And here Fuld’s testimony. Click here.  On Saturday, September 13, 2008, Tim Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called a 6:00 pm meeting on the future of Lehman, which included the possibility of an emergency liquidation of its assets. More on NY Times. Lehman was reported that it had been in talks with Bank of America and Barclays for the company’s possible sale. Both Bank of America and Barclays refused to purchase Lehman. Bank of America announced their purchase investment firm Merrill Lynch (which was on the verge of bankruptcy) on September 14, 2008. Bank of America shareholders acquisition on December 5, 2008, and the deal closed January 1, 2009. Lehman filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch.) As for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, these two investment firms were in financial trouble. However, then U.S. Treasury and former Goldman CEO, Hank Paulson come to their rescue. From Wikipedia:

At one point, Hank Paulson offered Morgan Stanley to JPMorgan Chase at no cost, but Jamie Dimon refused the offer. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last two major investment banks in the US, both announced on September 22, 2008 that they would become traditionalbank holding companies regulated by the Federal Reserve.^[25] The Federal Reserve’s approval of their bid to become banks ended the ascendancy of securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and capped weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp.

And according to The Guardian:

The Federal Reserve’s surprise announcement, which came at 2.30am London time, places the banks under the supervision the bank regulators and gives them easier access to credit to help them ride out the financial crisis.

Thanks to Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chief, two of the investment firms (Goldman and Morgan Stanley) became a bank holding companies which placed the firms in receivership of bank regulators supervision and receive bailout monies in 2008, 1 investment firm (Merrill Lynch) is owned by a bank, and the other investment firm, Lehman Brothers, went down in flames.

Chris Hayes discusses with Barney Frank whether or not breaking up the big banks

And former Congressman Barney Frank disagree with some of Bernie Sanders’ stance of breaking up the banks and the Glass-Steagall and defended Hillary Clinton’ Wall Street reform plan. But, what I find interesting from Chris Hayes’ interview with Frank is that Congressman Frank stated that Lehman Brothers was an investment banks and Glass-Steagall would not have helped Lehman.

Yes, Lehman Brothers was an investment firm but what Congressman Frank left out from the interview is that Lehman Brothers had a subprime mortgage company called BNC Mortgage and Aurora Loan Services LLC:

Lehman Brothers took an ownership stake in BNC in 2000 and acquired the lender in 2003. Founded in 1995, BNC Mortgage had its initial public offering in 1998. Two years later, BNCM Acquisition, a group including the company’s top managers, took the company private. In 2004, one of its partial owners, Lehman Brothers, bought it. In addition to owning subprime lenders, Lehman was also a top underwriter of subprime mortgages for other businesses.

………………..

• Parent/subsidiary companies: BNC Mortgage Inc. was the primary subprime lending subsidiary for Lehman. Others included Finance America LLC (which merged with BNC in 2005) and Aurora Loan Services LLC (acquired in 1997).

And this is why the Glass-Steagall act was repealed to allow banks and investment firms to intertwine products and services together rather become separated. Unfortunately, Lehman wasn’t allow to be a bank holding company:

Timothy Geithner, then New York Fed president, now Treasury secretary, didn’t like the idea of letting an investment bank become a bank holding company — so he said no.

Yet, in 2008, Federal Reserve allowed Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to become bank holding company:

The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to prevent the crisis on Wall Street from infecting its two premier institutions, took the extraordinary measure on Sunday night of agreeing to convert investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.into traditional bank holding companies.

And keep in mind that Morgan Stanley had a subprime mortgage, Saxon Mortgage and Goldman Sachs had a subprime mortgage, Litton Loans.

So, yes, Congressman Barney Frank, Glass-Steagall law needs to be reinstated to end the merging of investment and commercial banking activities.

Here Chris Hayes’ interview with Barney Frank:

on.msnbc.com/1RbeGZB

 

The No. 1 ‘too big to fail’ bank is…

Drum roll please….

CNN Money:

To prevent that, watchdogs around the world are keeping an eye on big banks that are “too big to fail.”

The G20 just put out its latest ranking of banks that could cause a lot of damage.

At the top of the list are two firms: JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and HSBC(HSBC).

The G20 calls JPMorgan and HSBC the most “systemically important banks” in the world. That’s another way of saying “too big to fail.”

It means they are not only big, but they do a lot of business around the globe.

AIG should break up to avoid ‘too-big-to-fail’ label: Icahn

Ever since the US began selling off its $183 billion stake in American International Group — which taxpayers bailed out during the financial crisis — the insurance giant has served as a favorite playground for big-name investors like John Paulson and Bruce Berkowitz.

Now it’s mega-billionaire Carl Icahn’s turn.

The activist investor announced via his Twitter feed on Wednesday that he had taken a “large stake” in AIG and had sent its chief executive a letter suggesting the company be broken into three parts.

Turning a popular phrase on its ear, Icahn said that AIG was “too big to succeed.”

AIG shares jumped 4.9 percent on the news, closing Wednesday at $63.90 — and pushing its 2015 gain to 14 percent.

Icahn’s entreaties may be a hard sell: Even before Wednesday’s stock pop, AIG was doing a lot better than Icahn Enterprises, which has tumbled 16 percent in 2015.

Icahn called on AIG CEO Peter Hancock to separate the company’s life and mortgage insurance units from its property-and-casualty business, and “embark on a much needed cost control program to close the gap with peers.”

Read on.

Fact Check: Did Glass-Steagall Cause The 2008 Financial Crisis?

aking on Wall Street makes for good politics in the Democratic Party. And several of the candidates at Tuesday night’s debate had tough words about big banks. That was particularly true of former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Although he didn’t say so directly, O’Malley suggested several times that consolidation in the banking business was a big factor in the 2008 financial crash and that the U.S. economy remains vulnerable because of it.

His solution: Bring back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that barred commercial banks from engaging in investment banking that was scaled back in the Clinton administration. We decided to look at O’Malley’s claim about the risks of bank consolidation.

The Claim:

“[T]he big banks — I mean, once we repealed Glass-Steagall back in the late 1999s, the big banks, the six of them, went from controlling, what, the equivalent of 15 percent of our GDP to now 65 percent of our GDP.”

The Big Question:

How much bigger have the largest banks gotten, what did Glass-Steagall have to do with it and, most important, did the scaling back of Glass-Steagall lead to the 2008 financial collapse?

The Broader Context:

Despite what O’Malley and many other people believe, Glass-Steagall was not technically repealed in 1999, but it was effectively neutered. Legislation was passed that year that allowed bank holding companies to engage in previously forbidden commercial activities, such as insurance and investment banking.

The change in the law opened the floodgates for giant mergers, such as the $33 billion deal between J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan in September of 2000. During the darkest days of the financial crisis, Bank of America acquired two troubled financial companies — Countrywide Financial Services and Merrill Lynch, deals that wouldn’t have been possible before 1999.

The Long Answer:

The biggest banks are a lot bigger than they once were, mostly because of mergers and acquisitions. What’s not in dispute is that changes to Glass-Steagall allowed the biggest banks to grow bigger, which has raised new concerns about risks to the financial system.

At issue is the “too big to fail” problem: Will the federal government once again be forced to come to the aid of federally insured megabanks that have taken outsize risks with their money?

Since 2008, regulatory changes in the U.S. and abroad have supposedly mitigated that danger. The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill contains complicated provisions that would allow regulators to step in and take over failing banks, if necessary.

But there’s plenty of skepticism that the changes have gone far enough.

Read on.

Hillary Clinton Reveals Her Plan To “Prevent The Next Crash” In Bloomberg Op-Ed

First published in Bloomberg View

My Plan to Prevent the Next Crash

Seven years after the financial crash, despite important new rules signed into law by President Barack Obama, there are risks in our financial system that could still cause another crisis. Banks have paid billions of dollars in fines, but few executives have been held personally accountable. “Too big to fail” is still too big a problem. Regulators don’t have all the tools and support they need to protect our economy. To prevent irresponsible behavior on Wall Street from ever again devastating Main Street, we need more accountability, tougher rules and stronger enforcement. I have a plan to build on the progress we’ve made under President Obama and do just that.

In the years before the crash, as financial firms piled risk upon risk, regulators in Washington either couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up. Top regulators under President George W. Bush posed for a picture literally taking a chain saw to banking rules. Before the crisis hit, as a senator from New York, I was alarmed by this gathering storm, and called for addressing the risks of derivatives, cracking down on abusive subprime mortgages and improving financial oversight. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress largely ignored calls for reform. The result cost 9 million Americans their jobs, drove 5 million families out of their homes and wiped out more than $13 trillion in household wealth.

Thanks to President Obama’s leadership and the determination and sacrifice of the American people, we’ve worked our way out of that ditch and put our economy on sounder footing. Now we have to keep going.

First, it’s time for more accountability on Wall Street. Stories of misconduct in the financial industry are shocking — like HSBC allowing drug cartels to launder money or five major banks pleading guilty to felony charges for conspiring to manipulate currency exchange rates. This is criminal behavior, yet the individuals responsible often get off with limited consequences — or none at all. I want to change that.

People who commit serious financial crimes should face serious consequences, including big fines, disbarment from working in the industry and the prospect of imprisonment. As president, I will seek to extend the statute of limitations for major financial crimes, enhance whistle-blower rewards, and increase resources for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate and prosecute individuals. We should also hold financial executives accountable for egregious misconduct by their subordinates. They need to lose their bonuses and, in some cases, their jobs.

Second, I will work with Congress and independent regulators to rein in the complexity and riskiness of major financial institutions. The Dodd-Frank Act that President Obama signed after the crisis has already made important reforms, but there’s more to do.

One serious approach being advocated is to pass an updated Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial and investment banking, to reduce the size of the banks and the risk of a taxpayer bailout. I certainly share the goal of never having to bail out the big banks again, but I prefer the path of tackling the most dangerous risks in a different way.

To start, I will propose a new fee on risk that would discourage the type of excessive leverage and short-term borrowing that could spark another crisis. We should also strengthen and enforce the Volcker Rule so banks can’t make risky and speculative trading bets with taxpayer-backed money. And if a bank suffers losses that threaten its overall financial health, senior managers should lose some or all of their bonus compensation. That will ensure that financial executives have skin in the game and a real incentive to avoid reckless risk-taking.

My plan would also give regulators the authority they need to reorganize, downsize or even break apart any financial institution that is too large and risky to be managed effectively. It is a comprehensive and flexible approach. It allows regulators to adapt to changing markets and help ensure that large financial firms never pose a danger to our entire economy.

We’ve learned the hard way that there’s no substitute for tough, empowered regulators with the resources and support to do their job. That’s why I’ve supported Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin’s bill to restore trust in government and slow Wall Street’s revolving door. We need to find the best, most independent-minded people for these important regulatory jobs — people who will put consumers and everyday investors ahead of the industries and institutions they’re supposed to oversee.

Third, we need a comprehensive strategy to reduce risk everywhere in the financial system. After all, many of the firms at the heart of the crash in 2008, like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and AIG, were not traditional banks. I’ll push for stronger oversight of the “shadow banking” sector, which includes certain activities of hedge funds, investment banks and other nonbank finance companies.

Fourth, we need to ensure that everyday investors and consumers can trust that our financial markets work for them — and not just for insiders with the most sophisticated, specialized and fastest connections. That is why we should impose a tax on the high-frequency trading that makes our markets less stable and less fair. And we should reform the rules that govern our stock markets to ensure equal access to markets and information, increase transparency, and minimize conflicts of interest.

Finally, I will veto any legislation that would weaken Dodd-Frank. We can’t go back to the days when Wall Street could write its own rules. I believe we can defend Dodd-Frank while easing burdens on community banks so they are able to lend responsibly to the hardworking families and small businesses they know and trust. We also have to defeat Republican attempts to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — an agency dedicated solely to protecting Americans from unfair and deceptive financial practices — and to exploit the upcoming budget and debt-ceiling negotiations for rollbacks in financial reforms.

The bottom line is that we can never allow what happened in 2008 to happen again. Just as important, we have to encourage Wall Street to live up to its proper role in our economy —helping Main Street grow and prosper. With strong rules of the road and smart incentives, the financial industry can help more young families buy that first home, make it possible for entrepreneurs to create new small businesses and support hardworking Americans saving for retirement. My plan will help us unlock that potential. We’ll create good-paying jobs, raise incomes and help families afford a middle-class life, with less speculation and more growth — growth that’s strong, fair and long-term. That’s what I’m fighting for in my campaign, and that’s what I’ll do as president.

Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Reform Plan Is A Rebuke To The Obama Administration

Hillary just released her plan to reform Wall Street…

But she stops well short of Bernie Sanders’ call to break up the banks.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton on Thursday detailed her plans to crack down on risky Wall Street behavior, delivering a sharp rebuke to the Obama administration’s weak enforcement against financial misconduct. But the candidate stopped short of calling to break up big banks, drawing a clear contrast with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), her top rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The core of Clinton’s plan, provided to The Huffington Post by a campaign aide, involves closing loopholes in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill and strengthening enforcement against financial wrongdoing. Clinton does not call for the ambitious restructuring of the banking sector that many in the Democratic Party’s activist base are clamoring for. Nevertheless, her reform package draws a marked contrast with the Obama administration’s poor enforcement of financial fraud statutes and its general acquiescence to big banks on matters of policy. In at least one case, Clinton directly calls to roll back a major Obama administration concession to Wall Street.

“Clinton understands the financial crisis showed how irresponsible behavior in the financial sector can devastate the lives of Americans across the country,” the aide said in an emailed statement.

The plan would stiffen penalties for financial fraud and require financial executives to personally foot the bill for settlements and fines levied against their companies. Clinton would also curtail the use of so-called “deferred prosecution agreements,” in which the Department of Justice agrees to call off its investigation if a company makes important operational changes — effectively letting wrongdoers off the hook. No major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for financial crime under President Barack Obama and his two attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.

But the bulk of Clinton’s plan focuses on closing holes that bank lobbyists have drilled into the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform package in the years since its original conception. The bill originally banned federal subsidies for risky derivatives trading, but Congress reinstated the Wall Street perks late last year as part of a government funding bill. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to bring down the funding bill over the subsidies, Obama and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon personally lobbied lawmakers to approve the provision. The plan Clinton announced Thursday would repeal the perks, returning to the original intent of Dodd-Frank.

Read on.

Sorry Hillary, the big banks who own more than 50% GDP in this country need to be broken up.

Global watchdog seeks deal on ending ‘too big to fail’ banks

Global regulators meet in London on Friday to agree a rule on stopping banks being “too big to fail” by requiring them to hold enough equity capital and bonds to avoid taxpayers being called on in a crisis.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), chaired by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, wants the world’s biggest banks to have enough funds to tap when in trouble.

The proposed rule is known as total loss absorbency capacity or TLAC, and is seen by Carney as the last major reform after the 2007-09 financial crisis forced governments to shore up lenders.

The rule will apply to nearly all the 30 big banks the FSB has already deemed to be “globally systemic” such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and HSBC.

Under the original proposal, the banks would hold TLAC, made up of capital and bond issuance, equivalent to 16 to 20 percent of their risk-weighted assets, when written down.

Read on.