Remember this acronym. SDI. It stands for systemically dangerous institutions. Translation: banks that are too big to fail.
Somehow, those in charge of our staggering, inherently fallible, economic system have decided that such institutions actually exist. The only criteria for them, seems to be that they are so big, and control such a large segment of the economic world in which they exist, that if they went down, so would the entire system.
HSBC is such an institution; so it seems are Bank of America, Wells Fargo and, among others, UBS. Why do I make this assumption? Because all of these institutions are stealing with both hands and nothing is being done to stop them. The CEOs and CFO’s of these institutions are the great criminals of our time, not the guys who pull off diamond heists or the major drug dealers. These guys steal billions not the petty thousands that your more easily identifiable criminal types do. These guys get feted at banquets of their peers for being pillars of society as they take the bread from the mouths of starving children whose parent’s jobs they have destroyed and homes they have stolen through their financial manipulations.
Who has decided that these SDIs are too big to fail? President Barak Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron, that’s who. Why did they do this? Because the current financial myth decrees that if one of these huge banks failed they would bring on a new recession and everyone is terrified of that happening. So what’s the answer, do we just let these thieves, these greedy pigs who are already rich beyond most people’s imaginations just keep hoarding more and more until the rest of the world starves around them or do we do something about it?
It really isn’t a question of will we do something, it’s a question of when, because if we don’t act these rutting hogs will destroy the world, but first they will destroy democracy in this country, something they have been trying to do for half a century.
The first step is to convince the powers that be, the heads of the governments, Obama & Cameron, that prosecuting the officers of the banks will not cause the banks to crash. This is the big lie, the propaganda number that the high-end financial officers have been spreading for years, just to keep themselves out of jail.
Businesses that crash when their leadership is taken away, are almost entirely run by entrepreneurial management, men or women who started the businesses and made them successful by the force of their personalities and the skills or intelligence they brought to the marketplace. The financial system is not currently run by entrepreneurial types but by interchangeable parts; men who rose through the system by means of personal guile and a certain knack for failing upward. None of them are irreplaceable the way a founding entrepreneur is.
If Jamie Dimon quits tomorrow, JPMorganChase will continue on without a bump. The same is true if he or any of his fellow CEOs or CFOs or lower ranking officers go to jail. That’s the key.
Fining HSBC a couple of billion bucks sounds impressive until you realize that they stole a couple of hundred billion and that if no one in the company is going to do time for this theft, there is no down side to their act, at least not for them. If the five top officers, the compliance officer and the department heads responsible for the problem all went to jail, this kind of theft would stop in a heartbeat. These are not guys who are stealing to feed their families. These are guys who are stealing for a bigger yacht. The motivation to steal drops significantly when it’s just about more, especially when one is faced with sharing a jail cell with Big Pansy.
If some kid sticks up the corner grocery and grabs five hundred bucks, he does time. He either learns that it isn’t worth it or he learns to do it better. These thieving bankers don’t have to learn anything because they pay less of a fine then they stole, thereby earning a profit on their felony and instead of doing time they go home to their families or back to the office to do it all over again.
Under the current system of fines and pats on the butt, the larceny will go on forever but if a couple of these crooks get big jail sentences it will almost disappear. I say “almost” because it will never completely disappear, there will always be crooks.
After we’ve established that no one working in the banking or investment industry is too important to go to jail, the next step is to make sure that none of the banks are too big to fail. That means breaking up the banks; dividing them up until a failure by any of them, will only cause a blip on the world financial screen.
The first step has to be prying the commercial banks away from the investment banks. These guys only consolidated so the investment side guys could take chances with your money, which you deposited in the supposedly safe commercial side banks. It involved the added fillip of the government covering any losses that happened to commercial bank money when the investment side guys lost it.
FDR split them up after the last depression. Then the Republicans came along, broke down all his good work and created a new system that failed the country yet again. It’s time for Barak Obama to stand up on his hind legs and do the right thing for the nation and the world. Break up the banks.