Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard warned Tuesday regulatory changes haven’t solved the too-big-to-fail problem in banking, adding that he’d support a break-up of the biggest banks in the U.S.
“It’s naive to think that macro prudential tools as they exist today are sufficient†to tackle new bubbles without notable help from Federal Reserve interest rate policy, Mr. Bullard said. He was referring to the suite of tools the Fed and other agencies have to intervene in a targeted fashion when authorities believe financial markets have become unstable.
WSJ, Bullard Calls For Breaking Up Nation’s Biggest Banks
Robert Johnson recognizes that rampant inequality could be the death of us all. “People need to know there are possibilities for their children, that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else,†he said at Davos. Johnson continued, “There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get even more money.â€
That’s the money they get from the plutocrats who pull their strings; in the past three elections alone, the financial sector has given $256 million to Republicans and $153 million to Democrats.
USA Today recently editorialized, “Wall Street got its swagger back not long after the bailout, which is no surprise. Its culture is built on greed and ego. What is more surprising is how quickly Congress again became Wall Street’s errand boy.â€
Michael Winship, The Super-Rich Can’t Hide From the Rest of Us
If called on their bets, the Comex cannot come up with the bullion to answer it, except at much higher prices. And I am talking about many hundreds of dollars higher, probably into the 2,000 range, unless they can get the government/judiciary to allow them to declare some favorable sort of force majeure as they did in the case of MF Global.
The only real doubt in my mind is how badly leveraged the New York and London crowd are, and how many cross claims exist for each ounce of physical metal. I suspect it is worse than I think.
