Robert Scheer: Congress Still Puts Out for Wall Street

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Congress Still Puts Out for Wall Street

Posted on May 27, 2013
By Robert Scheer


What does it take to make a Wall Street banker squirm with shame? Not content with having swindled tens of millions of Americans out of their homes and life savings, the very bankers who caused the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression are now subverting government regulations designed to prevent comparable disasters in the future.

Top of the list of those responsible are the hustlers at Citigroup, once the world’s largest financial conglomerate, and a leading practitioner of the sordid behavior that caused the housing meltdown. Indeed, Citigroup was allowed to form as a merger of the investment banking of Travelers and the federal insured commercial banking of Citicorp only because lobbyists for those institutions successfully engineered the reversal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that had banned such combinations.

Then when the new monster banks moved to exploit the subprime housing market with all sorts of financial gimmicks, their lobbyists succeeded in freeing all such trading in so called derivatives from any significant regulation.

The banks were so successful in marketing those often toxic assets that the federal government had to step in when the bubble burst and save Citigroup from bankruptcy, with a direct infusion of $45 billion in taxpayer funds and a guarantee of more than $300 billion of Citigroup’s bad paper. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/congress_still_puts_out_for_wall_street_20130527/

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. "I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring in higher prices

"I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring in higher prices than any in the world." Mark Twain