Break up the Megabanks: My take in the New York Times debate

Across the globe, we continue to feel the repercussions of negligent, reckless, and dangerous banking practices rewarded for screwing up so broadly and decisively. And it's far from over. Here in the US, the biggest banks are bigger, riskier, bloated with federal subsidies, and more of a threat to us than ever before. Thank you, Ben Bernanke, the Fed, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, the Treasury Department, Barack Obama, Larry Summers, George Bush, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, John Thain and all the other pillagers who took part in this national and international travesty. 

We aren't done with this crisis. It's just in remission given the epic stimulus the big banks received. We shouldn't have to wait for the other shoe to drop to pull a Glass-Steagall. 

Read the rest of my comment, along with those of Simon Johnson, William Black and others, in the New York Times Debate Forum.

Congrats to Live my Life/TARP video - another win!

In the wake of this week's Fed dumping of more details behind its bailout and subsidization of the global banking community program, we got reminded that TARP was a tiny fraction of the aid inhaled by the banks that screwed us all to begin with. Indeed, as we knew and now see in more detail, the Fed was, and remains, the biggest bailout and least accountable (when it matters) engineer. The data dump re-underscores the unprecedented largesse granted to the US banking system in its hours of need, as opposed to the US general population. Another reason why we'd be better off without Bernanke.

But, there's some good news. My friends, Michael Cornell, Tracey Paleo and the rest of the talented, enthusiastic and dedicated team behind the Live My Live Video - just won ANOTHER award! - this time FIRST place in the music video category of the California Film Awards. Check out the video, if you haven't already.

The Fed's Lending Reports: Not that Earth-shattering by design

So after much anticipation (though I've got to admit, I wasn't exactly waiting for it with bated breath), the Fed released its official crisis lending report. The idea was that it would shed more light over which banks got the most perks during the Great Bank Bailout and Subsidization period. And, whereas it certainly gives more detail on which specific securities where pledged in return for which emergency facility funds during the crisis - for which you have to dig into several different pages on the Fed's website to get to each facility and each excel report separately. The Fed provided no descriptive aggregations (like how many AA securities that were subsequently downgraded because their underlying loans sucked, did Citigroup pledge across Fed facilities, etc) though, that can be determined by further inspection of the data. Even so, the reports don't really tell us anything we don't already know. Long story short,  spanning 21,000 transactions from December 2007 to July 2010, they don't reveal which banks borrowed what from the Fed’s discount window (the part we wanted to know), while confirming that the biggest banks got the most help from various facilities (the part we already knew).

But hey – the future of the free world was at stake, the Fed did what it had to do, and things would have been much so worse without fearless Ben, Tim and the boys intervening with trillions of manufactured dollars. Bernanke can breathe a sigh of relief. Why? Because he dodged a big bullet and the gun is now empty. He didn't really disclose any earth shattering information in all the various legs of this report. It will take a bit of time to comb through each spreadsheet, but on first glance, beyond the litany of dodgy securities, mostly rated AAA despite all the incompetence of the rating agencies, used to extract more useful funds, it reveals nothing about the manner in which the biggest, most powerful banks gamed the system to survive on federal capital.