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The Big Banks Need Breaking Up—and Washington Knows It

The Big Banks Need Breaking Up—and Washington Knows It
Mon, 1/14/2013 - by Robert Reich

TARP—the infamous Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out Wall Street in 2008—is over. The Treasury Department announced it will be completing the sale of the remaining shares it owns of the banks and of General Motors.

But in reality it’s not over. The biggest Wall Street banks are now far bigger than they were four years ago when they were considered too big to fail. The five largest have almost 44 percent of all US bank deposits.

That’s up from 37 percent in 2007, just before the crash. A decade ago they had just 28 percent.

The biggest banks keep getting bigger because they can borrow more cheaply than smaller banks. That’s because investors believe the government will bail them out if they get into trouble, rather than force them into a form of bankruptcy (as the new Dodd-Frank law makes possible).

That’s why it’s necessary to limit their size and break up the biggest.

Washington may be getting the message. A few months ago Dan Tarullo, the Fed governor who specializes in bank regulation, proposed capping the size of the banks’ balance sheets.

Some former titans of Wall Street are saying much the same thing. Even Sandy Weill, who created Citigroup (which required $445 billion in TARP loans and asset guarantees) is proposing the biggest banks be broken up.

The new Congress may also be supportive. The new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling, has been a strong ally of small banks in their push to rein in their bigger rivals, and has expressed concern about the largest being too big to fail.

It’s not irrelevant that the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve Board, in Hensarling’s home district, has also proposed breaking up the biggest.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, is a strong advocate for breaking up the big banks and is now on the Senate Finance Committee. And Elizabeth Warren, scourge of Wall Street, will sit on the Senate Banking Committee.

In other words, the timing is right. The oven is ready. All we need is another multibillion dollar banking loss—like JP Morgan Chase’s last year—and the biggest banks are cooked.

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Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

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Posted 1 month 3 weeks ago

Thanks to the Electoral College, leftists have perhaps the final say this November over whether democracy can hold on for at least another four years, or if fascism will take root and infect all facets of the federal government for decades to come.

Posted 2 weeks 18 hours ago

What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.

Posted 1 month 1 week ago

History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships. When democracies fall, they typically fall completely.

Posted 2 weeks 2 days ago

Agriculture, the service economy, sexual exploitation, manufacturing, construction and domestic work drive today's enslavement around the world.

Posted 1 week 15 hours ago

Thanks to the Electoral College, leftists have perhaps the final say this November over whether democracy can hold on for at least another four years, or if fascism will take root and infect all facets of the federal government for decades to come.

History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships. When democracies fall, they typically fall completely.