Obama Group Being Sneaky With Wall Street

Stunner! Gov’t “Secretly” Moves To Backstop Wall Street’s Derivatives Exchanges, Globally

 By bobswern on May 26, 2012

Around the time I posted my two latest diaries, early on Thursday [SEE: “Already In Deep Hot Water, JPMorgan Chase May Have Just Reached Its Boiling Point (Part I of II)” and “‘WhaleMu–JP Morgan’s Next Surprise?’ by Michael Olenick (Part II of II)”], little did I know that THIS absolute stunner appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

The story, and the facts related to it, truly speaks for itself. Here are excerpts from it from Thursday’s Wall Street Journal…

…J.P. Morgan's recent trading loss and the resulting Washington blather about tighter regulation have grabbed headlines. Little noticed is that on Tuesday Team Obama took its first formal steps toward putting taxpayers behind Wall Street derivatives trading—not behind banks that might make mistakes in derivatives markets, but behind the trading itself. Yes, the same crew that rails against the dangers of derivatives is quietly positioning these financial instruments directly above the taxpayer safety net.

We’re reminded of the Dodd-Frank legislation, wherein: ”One part of the law forces much of the derivatives market into clearinghouses that stand behind every trade. Mr. Dodd's pet provision creates a mechanism for bailing out these clearinghouses when they run into trouble.”

…the law authorizes the Federal Reserve to provide "discount and borrowing privileges" to clearinghouses in emergencies. Traditionally the ability to borrow from the Fed's discount window was reserved for banks, but the new law made clear that a clearinghouse receiving assistance was not required to "be or become a bank or bank holding company." To get help, they only needed to be deemed "systemically important" by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council chaired by the Treasury Secretary.

Last year regulators finalized rules for how they would use this new power. On Tuesday, they began using it. The Financial Stability Oversight Council secretly voted to proceed toward inducting several derivatives clearinghouses into the too-big-to-fail club. After further review, regulators will make final designations, probably later this year, and will announce publicly the names of institutions deemed systemically important.

We're told that the clearinghouses of Chicago's CME Group and Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange were voted systemic this week, and rumor has it that the council may even designate London-based LCH.Clearnet as critical to the U.S. financial system.

(Hot-link to Financial Stability Oversight Council is provided by diarist. Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.)

The piece continues on to report on remarks by former Goldman Sachs senior exec Gary Gensler, who’s now the Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). We’re told that:  “…U.S. taxpayers thinking that they couldn't possibly be forced to stand behind [U.S. banks’] overseas derivatives trading will not be comforted…” by Chairman Gensler’s remarks from this past Monday, where he “…emphasized his determination to extend Dodd-Frank derivatives regulation to overseas markets when subsidiaries of U.S. firms are involved.”

For more on the Financial Stability Oversight Council, simply click on the hot-link to it, above.

If you wish to learn more about the potential implications of this action, I would strongly suggest a read of my two posts from Thursday, also linked above. IMHO, this is a stunning development that is directly-related to those two posts.

It is truly amazing that our government uses the convenient reality that our nation’s too-big-to-fail banks simply cannot be properly regulated because much of these banks’ activities occur globally, outside of our government’s jurisdiction. However, as of this week, it is now a part of “the record” that when it comes to backstopping Wall Street’s actions with U.S. taxpayer money, on an international basis, there’s no problem facilitating that ongoing travesty…whatsoever.

Sun May 27, 2012 at  4:48 AM PT: Please checkout THIS comment.

Technorati Tags: Bipartisanship,Corruption,Democrats,Derivatives,Ninety Nine Percent,1%,Plutocracy,Privatized Profits,Wall Street,JPMorgan,Wall Street Casino,Current Events

 

President Obama Talks On Mitt Romney’s Bain Experience

  President Obama had a little chat at the Iowa fairgrounds with the fair-goers on Thursday and the President had a few sharp words on Mitts time ( his record ) at his former ( ? ) company, Bain Capitol, and what it would says about Romney’s approach to the Presidentcy.

   A few snips of Obama’s speech, which can be read in its entirety right here.

Governor Romney has made his experience as a financial CEO the entire rationale of his candidacy for president. Now, he doesn’t really talk about what he did in Massachusetts. But he does talk about being a business—business guy. Right? He says this gives him a special understanding of what it takes to create jobs and grow the economy—even if he’s unable to offer a single new idea about how to do that, no matter how many times he’s asked about it, he says he knows how to do it. So I think it’s a good idea to look at the way he sees the economy.

Obama then pointed out that Romney's goal was to earn a profit for Bain, not to create jobs. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, he said, but:

When maximizing short-term gains for your investors rather than building companies that last is your goal, then sometimes it goes the other way. Workers get laid off. Benefits disappear. Pensions are cut. Factories go dark. In some cases, companies are loaded up with debt — not to make the companies more productive, not to buy new equipment to keep them at the cutting-edge, but just to pay investors. Companies may go bankrupt as a result. Taxpayers may be on the hook to help out on those pensions. Investors walk off with big returns, and working folks get stuck holding the bag.

And experience in doing those sorts of things—in short, Mitt Romney's experience—is not what we want in the White House, Obama said.

Now, that may be the job of somebody who's engaged in corporate buyouts. That’s fine. But that’s not the job of a President. (Applause.) That’s not the President's job. There may be value for that kind of experience, but it’s not in the White House. (Applause.)

Obama then made the case for what he thinks a president should be focused on:

See, the job of a President is to lay the foundation for strong and sustainable broad-based growth — not one where a small group of speculators are cashing in on short-term gains. It’s to make sure that everybody in this country gets a fair shake—(applause)—everybody gets a fair shot, everybody is playing by the same set of rules. (Applause.)

Without using labels, Obama then contrasted the Democratic vision for American capitalism with Mitt Romney's Republican vision:

Now, let me tell you something. We believe in the profit motive. We believe that risk-takers and investors should be rewarded. That's what makes our economy so dynamic. But we also believe everybody should have opportunity. (Applause.) We believe—we think everybody who makes the economy more productive or a company more productive should benefit.

And the problem with our economy isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough—you’re working harder than ever. Productivity is through the roof. It's been going up consistently over the last decade. The challenge we face right now—the challenge we’ve faced for over a decade—is that harder work hasn’t led to higher incomes. Bigger profits haven’t led to better jobs. And you can’t solve that problem if you can’t even see that it's a problem. (Applause.)

And he doesn't see it's a problem. And so this experience explains why he is proposing the exact same policies that we already tried in the last decade, the very policies that got us into this mess. He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors are getting rich, then the wealth is going to trickle down and the rest of us are going to do well, too. And he is wrong. Source

  I’m not sure about you, but, I do not think that America needs another businessman in the White House. Just think back to our last President with an MBA, George Bush. His business acumen is what got the United States into this mess in the first place. Mitt Romney’s policies would be just a continuance of Bush’s.

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