The Autism Spiral? (obligatory loluk thread)

[Al Simmons]

I have actually been building up stores of fat for just such an occurence. All you skinny guys will be dead inside a couple weeks

[Pattern]

Yeah, debt jubilee isn't the answer....

....The only way out imho is a) stop giving money to the banks, give it to the population who then use it to pay off any debt they hold or if debt free spend it on whatever to kickstart the economy again

Not sure if serious.

[Bartholomeus Crane]

The only person who every used the term "debt jubillee" who wasn't dancing in his own shit with his pant's on his head insane was David Graeber and his feeble copout at the end of Debt: the first 5000 years explained just why the occupy movement was going to vanish up it's own arse.

A debt jubilee solves nothing, rewards the worst of the "bad actors" like megacorps swamped in debt from mergers and takeovers and pathetic governments with greedy stupid voters. So you wipe out the savers - mostly in the developing world - and achieve nothing. Because guess what? After every debt jubileee you merely get more debt, just this time with loan-shark interest rates to cover the risk of another jubillee.

The whole jubilee issue is as inane and dumb-ignorant scary as the gold standard idiots.

Entirely depends on how you structure the debt jubilee.


Your obtuse and frankly moronic description of what a 'debt jubilee' actually is and who it is aimed at is typical of the backward responses commonly given when it is mentioned. Which is why I much rather prefer the term 'quantitative easing for the people'.

At least then it is clear that it isn't a debt jubilee for the megacorps (not in a civilised country at least. You know, one where corporations aren't people?). As for wiping out savers. Not so. While debters will be forced to use the 'rebate' to pay off their debts, savers will get an equivalent 'rebate' in cash instead. Call it 'stimulus for the people'. If, at the same time you tighten regulations on the banks and private lending there's not going to be a debt explosion, and since the 'jubilee' is not a default, there's not going to be a interest rate hike either.

So, you see, you got it all wrong. Again. As usual really.

The simple fact is, most of the western capitalist soceities are either actually or rapidly becoming insolvent. Too much debt against declining asset values. This is a debt trap we're in. Meanwhile the governments are cutting services and increasing taxes to attack the problem by handing banks the tax revenues so they can deleverage themselves from their now shitty debt. QE for the banks at the cost of the taxpayers.

My point is: if you're going to do QE anyway, a much better solution is to apply QE for the people at the cost of the banks.

The only thing that is inane and dumb-ignorant scary is that there are people still patently incapable or unwilling to even try to understand how this might work. Well, that and the gold standard idiots ofcourse.

[Rudolf Miller]

  Spoiler:

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World... and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”

The fix was in to repeal Glass-Steagall, as The New York Times celebrated in a 1998 article: “…the announcement on Monday of a giant merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group not only altered the financial landscape of banking, it also changed the political landscape in Washington.... Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance, to make it more politically acceptable to more members of Congress.”

At the signing ceremony Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” What a jerk.

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed has had the honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

Instead, all such compartmentalization was ended when Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in late 1999. In his memoir Weill brags that he and Republican Senator Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.”

Gramm left the Senate to become a top executive at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which like Citigroup ran into deep trouble. Leach—former Republican Representative James Leach—was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where his banking skills could serve the needs of intellectuals. Robert Rubin, the Clinton administration treasury secretary who helped push through the Citigroup Authorization Act, was the most blatant double dealer of all: He accepted a $15-million-a-year offer from Weill to join Citigroup, where he eventually helped run the corporation into the ground.

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage–based securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Weill himself bailed out shortly before the crash. His retirement from what was then the world’s largest financial conglomerate was chronicled in the New York Times under the headline “Laughing All the Way From the Bank.” The article told of “an enormous wooden plaque” in the bank’s headquarters that featured a likeness of Weill with the inscription “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.”

That’s the man the American Academy of Arts & Sciences now honors, among others, for “extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve.” Disgusting.

http://www.thenation.com/article/167...sanford-weill#

Funny you should say that, WSJ has him turning about face on the subject.

Sandy Weill’s About-Face on Big Banks

Sandy Weill, the man who created the mammoth financial combination of Citicorp and Travelers, has had a change of heart.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” Weill told CNBC this morning.

Stop. Take that in.

This is more than a change of heart. That’s a heart transplant.

Go back 14 years to the key point in Weill’s career.

It was April 1998 when the news broke: Weill’s insurance and securities giant Travelers would merge with the banking giant Citigroup.

Here is how The Wall Street Journal described the merger at that time, with some help from Sallie Krawcheck, at that point a well-known banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein and not yet the boss of Citigroup’s brokerage arm:

The proposed marriage of a commercial bank with global reach and a major insurance and securities company also challenges long-held notions about what U.S.-based banks, brokers and insurers can do. The once-derided concept of a financial-services supermarket is back with a vengeance and analysts said almost any linkup seems possible. “There is a belief in the market that this is the merger heard ’round the world’ and it very well may be,” said Sallie Krawcheck, an analyst who follows securities firms for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “These guys are looking at financial services 10 years down the road and shaping the company to take advantage of it.”

The financial world saw the new Citigroup as essentially a dare for lawmakers still hesitant to repeal Glass-Steagall. A year and a half later, Congress got rid of the Depression-era law amid intense lobbying from the financial world. An example of Weill’s own involvement comes from a WSJ story ahead of the 1999 vote.

Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee told a Citigroup lobbyist, in the heat of the final battles, to “get Sandy Weill on the phone right now. Tell him to call the White House and get [them] moving or I’m going to shut this conference down,” WSJ wrote. President Bill Clinton eventually agreed to ditch the restrictions.

Today, following a financial crisis that was at least inflamed by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and after Citigroup itself took a bailout, Weill said that by breaking up banks, they would be “much” more profitable.

“This is what all the regional banks do and everybody says buy regional banks,” he said. “They’ll just be bigger regional banks.”

A Citigroup spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday.

Krawcheck again is in place to sum up the feelings. On Twitter today she wrote: “Ok, this is a wow.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/07/2...-on-big-banks/

[punkboy101]

Yeah, debt jubilee isn't the answer....

....The only way out imho is a) stop giving money to the banks, give it to the population who then use it to pay off any debt they hold or if debt free spend it on whatever to kickstart the economy again

Not sure if serious.

Perfectly serious =)

A debt Jubilee is the cancellation of all debt, so nobody gets paid, creating a shitstorm. Giving money to "the people" who in turn use it to pay off debt is not the same. At the moment, we are shoveling billions into banks who in turn are supposed to lend it to people and businesses to get the whole system going again. Except banks aren't doing what they are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is retarded anyway. Let's solve a debt problem by creating more debt! Currently the taxpayer is bailing out the banks, and buying up the bad debt, in addition to losing their houses, business and jobs, therefore having to sign onto the dole ect and putting further pressure on the system. It's lose lose for everyone but the banks.

What I'm saying is rather than shovel billions into banks who then do nothing to benefit people/society/the economy, we should be putting it into the the taxpayers pocket who use it to pay of debt (making the banks stronger due to recovering debt that was though of as "bad"), or use it to buy shit therefore boosting consumer spending leading to companies having more cash, potentially hiring more people to meet demand instead of laying people off, causing more people to have money to spend and paying taxes while reducing the amount governments have to spend on welfare/social housing. Win Win for everyone involved, not just the banks.

[Lallante]

The only person who every used the term "debt jubillee" who wasn't dancing in his own shit with his pant's on his head insane was David Graeber and his feeble copout at the end of Debt: the first 5000 years explained just why the occupy movement was going to vanish up it's own arse.

A debt jubilee solves nothing, rewards the worst of the "bad actors" like megacorps swamped in debt from mergers and takeovers and pathetic governments with greedy stupid voters. So you wipe out the savers - mostly in the developing world - and achieve nothing. Because guess what? After every debt jubileee you merely get more debt, just this time with loan-shark interest rates to cover the risk of another jubillee.

The whole jubilee issue is as inane and dumb-ignorant scary as the gold standard idiots.

Entirely depends on how you structure the debt jubilee.


Your obtuse and frankly moronic description of what a 'debt jubilee' actually is and who it is aimed at is typical of the backward responses commonly given when it is mentioned. Which is why I much rather prefer the term 'quantitative easing for the people'.

At least then it is clear that it isn't a debt jubilee for the megacorps (not in a civilised country at least. You know, one where corporations aren't people?). As for wiping out savers. Not so. While debters will be forced to use the 'rebate' to pay off their debts, savers will get an equivalent 'rebate' in cash instead. Call it 'stimulus for the people'. If, at the same time you tighten regulations on the banks and private lending there's not going to be a debt explosion, and since the 'jubilee' is not a default, there's not going to be a interest rate hike either.

So, you see, you got it all wrong. Again. As usual really.

The simple fact is, most of the western capitalist soceities are either actually or rapidly becoming insolvent. Too much debt against declining asset values. This is a debt trap we're in. Meanwhile the governments are cutting services and increasing taxes to attack the problem by handing banks the tax revenues so they can deleverage themselves from their now shitty debt. QE for the banks at the cost of the taxpayers.

My point is: if you're going to do QE anyway, a much better solution is to apply QE for the people at the cost of the banks.

The only thing that is inane and dumb-ignorant scary is that there are people still patently incapable or unwilling to even try to understand how this might work. Well, that and the gold standard idiots ofcourse.

This makes literally no sense whatsoever.

A debt jubilee is a writing off of debt at the expense of the creditor. The government giving people free money they must use to pay off debt is NOT a debt jubilee its a handout. Worse - if you only qualify for the handout to the extent you have debt its a reward for imprudent personal finances. Doubley worse - the government has to get that money from somewhere, either through borrowing itself (utterly crippling) or through printing money (causing insane hyperinflation - debt is a multiple of GDP!). Either way, this annihilates anyone with savings.

If you meant a real debt jubilee (i.e. fuck creditors) you simply end all lending at anything other than loan-shark rates as well as collapse all banks pretty much. This also annihilates anyone with savings, most businesses and all foreign investment.

If you mean a partial handout, i.e. the current rate of QE but the money distributed throughout the [taxpaying?] population evenly rather than used to buy bonds its not a jubilee in any sense and most people would not use the money to reduce debt. IF you force them to do so they will simply take out more debt as soon as the restriction ends.

[Lallante]

Yeah, debt jubilee isn't the answer....

....The only way out imho is a) stop giving money to the banks, give it to the population who then use it to pay off any debt they hold or if debt free spend it on whatever to kickstart the economy again

Not sure if serious.

Perfectly serious =)

A debt Jubilee is the cancellation of all debt, so nobody gets paid, creating a shitstorm. Giving money to "the people" who in turn use it to pay off debt is not the same. At the moment, we are shoveling billions into banks who in turn are supposed to lend it to people and businesses to get the whole system going again. Except banks aren't doing what they are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is retarded anyway. Let's solve a debt problem by creating more debt! Currently the taxpayer is bailing out the banks, and buying up the bad debt, in addition to losing their houses, business and jobs, therefore having to sign onto the dole ect and putting further pressure on the system. It's lose lose for everyone but the banks.

What I'm saying is rather than shovel billions into banks who then do nothing to benefit people/society/the economy, we should be putting it into the the taxpayers pocket who use it to pay of debt (making the banks stronger due to recovering debt that was though of as "bad"), or use it to buy shit therefore boosting consumer spending leading to companies having more cash, potentially hiring more people to meet demand instead of laying people off, causing more people to have money to spend and paying taxes while reducing the amount governments have to spend on welfare/social housing. Win Win for everyone involved, not just the banks.

How do you ensure people use it to pay off debt? What about people with no debt? What about the incredible inflation this would cause if you printed enough money to have anything more than a negligable effect on the total debt?

[punkboy101]

Yeah, debt jubilee isn't the answer....

....The only way out imho is a) stop giving money to the banks, give it to the population who then use it to pay off any debt they hold or if debt free spend it on whatever to kickstart the economy again

Not sure if serious.

Perfectly serious =)

A debt Jubilee is the cancellation of all debt, so nobody gets paid, creating a shitstorm. Giving money to "the people" who in turn use it to pay off debt is not the same. At the moment, we are shoveling billions into banks who in turn are supposed to lend it to people and businesses to get the whole system going again. Except banks aren't doing what they are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is retarded anyway. Let's solve a debt problem by creating more debt! Currently the taxpayer is bailing out the banks, and buying up the bad debt, in addition to losing their houses, business and jobs, therefore having to sign onto the dole ect and putting further pressure on the system. It's lose lose for everyone but the banks.

What I'm saying is rather than shovel billions into banks who then do nothing to benefit people/society/the economy, we should be putting it into the the taxpayers pocket who use it to pay of debt (making the banks stronger due to recovering debt that was though of as "bad"), or use it to buy shit therefore boosting consumer spending leading to companies having more cash, potentially hiring more people to meet demand instead of laying people off, causing more people to have money to spend and paying taxes while reducing the amount governments have to spend on welfare/social housing. Win Win for everyone involved, not just the banks.

How do you ensure people use it to pay off debt? What about people with no debt? What about the incredible inflation this would cause if you printed enough money to have anything more than a negligable effect on the total debt?

I don't have the answer on how you make people use it to pay off debt, that would be for someone much smarter than me to decide. As for incredible inflation, we are already printing billions in the form of QE, giving it to banks or taxpayers shouldn't have that much of an impact, and as for savers getting fucked, are you implying that's not already happening with the retardedly low interest rates most are getting ATM?

I'm not saying that this is the magic bullet, but I figure that if what we've been doing for the past five years has kept the system stable with no improvement at best, how can we expect it to get us out? It's time to try something new.

[Rudolf Miller]

Has anyone ever stopped to think, well maybe this is the best outcome we could get for now.

Seriously?

Anyone?

I'm going to posit Abed's Darkest Timeline theory here (http://community-sitcom.wikia.com/wi...rkest_Timeline)

The only difference is in our world, we see the present as always being in the darkest timeline, and we need to change something (more QE/debt jubilee/lower taxes on rich people etc etc) to get out of the darkest timeline.

No other comment on the matter, just something that crossed my mind. Apologies if it's too off topic.

[Smegs]

Worth moving this thread to srs bsns?

Oh and btw, why are we still using QE in the UK when the banking institutions are hoarding the money to cover debt/bolster credit sheets (more likely cover their own arses that are so far in debt to each other they are waiting to see who blinks first, takes the bullet and then all come clean) and not lending it to small business who could be the power for growth. Also the BoE's stupid idea of giving the banks yet more money on the flimsy understanding that they may or may not lend a small portion of it out to smaller businesses is bound to be another pointless propping exercise where the banks will just ... well, bank the cash and then hit the casino that is the stock market in an effort to make more cash for themselves .... which they will then fail to lend to anyone but each other.

/tinfoil the banks stocking up on cash may be a pointer to that they know something we dont about the inner workings of the banking system atm (well .... beyond the fact that we are in the shallow end of the kiddies pool of this stuff), perhaps they know the euro system really will collapse, perhaps the banks in the US are in a worse position than they let on, perhaps the bankers have finally realised the merry-go-round has stopped and are now getting the itch to duct-tape all the gaps lest the revolution happen and the banking system collapses completely this time /tinfoil

[elmicker]

Worse - if you only qualify for the handout to the extent you have debt its a reward for imprudent personal finances.

A similar problem has hamstrung this and the last governments' plans for elderly care. If you ask people to pay for it but guarantee care regardless of ability to pay, you end up rewarding those who pissed away all their cash and penalising those who were prudent (or lucky) with their finances.

[Bartholomeus Crane]

  Spoiler:

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World... and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”

The fix was in to repeal Glass-Steagall, as The New York Times celebrated in a 1998 article: “…the announcement on Monday of a giant merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group not only altered the financial landscape of banking, it also changed the political landscape in Washington.... Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance, to make it more politically acceptable to more members of Congress.”

At the signing ceremony Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” What a jerk.

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed has had the honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

Instead, all such compartmentalization was ended when Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in late 1999. In his memoir Weill brags that he and Republican Senator Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.”

Gramm left the Senate to become a top executive at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which like Citigroup ran into deep trouble. Leach—former Republican Representative James Leach—was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where his banking skills could serve the needs of intellectuals. Robert Rubin, the Clinton administration treasury secretary who helped push through the Citigroup Authorization Act, was the most blatant double dealer of all: He accepted a $15-million-a-year offer from Weill to join Citigroup, where he eventually helped run the corporation into the ground.

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage–based securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Weill himself bailed out shortly before the crash. His retirement from what was then the world’s largest financial conglomerate was chronicled in the New York Times under the headline “Laughing All the Way From the Bank.” The article told of “an enormous wooden plaque” in the bank’s headquarters that featured a likeness of Weill with the inscription “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.”

That’s the man the American Academy of Arts & Sciences now honors, among others, for “extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve.” Disgusting.

http://www.thenation.com/article/167...sanford-weill#

Funny you should say that, WSJ has him turning about face on the subject.

Sandy Weill’s About-Face on Big Banks

Sandy Weill, the man who created the mammoth financial combination of Citicorp and Travelers, has had a change of heart.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” Weill told CNBC this morning.

Stop. Take that in.

This is more than a change of heart. That’s a heart transplant.

Go back 14 years to the key point in Weill’s career.

It was April 1998 when the news broke: Weill’s insurance and securities giant Travelers would merge with the banking giant Citigroup.

Here is how The Wall Street Journal described the merger at that time, with some help from Sallie Krawcheck, at that point a well-known banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein and not yet the boss of Citigroup’s brokerage arm:

The proposed marriage of a commercial bank with global reach and a major insurance and securities company also challenges long-held notions about what U.S.-based banks, brokers and insurers can do. The once-derided concept of a financial-services supermarket is back with a vengeance and analysts said almost any linkup seems possible. “There is a belief in the market that this is the merger heard ’round the world’ and it very well may be,” said Sallie Krawcheck, an analyst who follows securities firms for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “These guys are looking at financial services 10 years down the road and shaping the company to take advantage of it.”

The financial world saw the new Citigroup as essentially a dare for lawmakers still hesitant to repeal Glass-Steagall. A year and a half later, Congress got rid of the Depression-era law amid intense lobbying from the financial world. An example of Weill’s own involvement comes from a WSJ story ahead of the 1999 vote.

Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee told a Citigroup lobbyist, in the heat of the final battles, to “get Sandy Weill on the phone right now. Tell him to call the White House and get [them] moving or I’m going to shut this conference down,” WSJ wrote. President Bill Clinton eventually agreed to ditch the restrictions.

Today, following a financial crisis that was at least inflamed by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and after Citigroup itself took a bailout, Weill said that by breaking up banks, they would be “much” more profitable.

“This is what all the regional banks do and everybody says buy regional banks,” he said. “They’ll just be bigger regional banks.”

A Citigroup spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday.

Krawcheck again is in place to sum up the feelings. On Twitter today she wrote: “Ok, this is a wow.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/07/2...-on-big-banks/

You spoiled my 'follow-up post' strategy. Anyway, that's why I brought it up. Talk about 'I've got mine'. Now he's out and safe he's shouting from the sidelines: "You're doing it all wrong!" Except, ofcourse, he was instrumental at bringing this about.

Some people just have no shame whatsoever ...

[Aurora148]

Australia tried the "hand out money to increase consumption" thing, nearly everyone just used it to pay down personal debts.

If the uk government wants the stimulate growth then they should drastically reduce VAT/fuel duty/taxes which directly add to the cost of goods. They should also be using QE to buy up as much of their own debt as possible, because then it isn't in the hands of fickle foreigners.

[elmicker]

If the uk government wants the stimulate growth then they should drastically reduce VAT/fuel duty/taxes which directly add to the cost of goods. They should also be using QE to buy up as much of their own debt as possible, because then it isn't in the hands of fickle foreigners.

alreet ed?

[Liare]

Australia tried the "hand out money to increase consumption" thing, nearly everyone just used it to pay down personal debts.

If the uk government wants the stimulate growth then they should drastically reduce VAT/fuel duty/taxes which directly add to the cost of goods. They should also be using QE to buy up as much of their own debt as possible, because then it isn't in the hands of fickle foreigners.

i like you imply that's somehow a bad thing that people spend the money on reducing debts...

[Aurora148]

Australia tried the "hand out money to increase consumption" thing, nearly everyone just used it to pay down personal debts.

If the uk government wants the stimulate growth then they should drastically reduce VAT/fuel duty/taxes which directly add to the cost of goods. They should also be using QE to buy up as much of their own debt as possible, because then it isn't in the hands of fickle foreigners.

i like you imply that's somehow a bad thing that people spend the money on reducing debts...

It doesn't immediately increase consumption because once their debts are paid down they don't go out and buy shit. It might be good in the long term but it doesn't increase GDP numbers quick enough to avoid a downgrade.

[Pattern]

It'll be good in the short term because people won't be spending x amount of their disposible income servicing interest repayments

[Liare]

It'll be good in the short term because people won't be spending x amount of their disposible income servicing interest repayments

unless the sum is so small it makes fuck all actual difference.

kinda like my last tax cut, that effectively amounted to a case of beer, every three months if i picked the cheap swill.

[Rudolf Miller]

  Spoiler:

  Spoiler:

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of US homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.” George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World... and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”

The fix was in to repeal Glass-Steagall, as The New York Times celebrated in a 1998 article: “…the announcement on Monday of a giant merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group not only altered the financial landscape of banking, it also changed the political landscape in Washington.... Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance, to make it more politically acceptable to more members of Congress.”

At the signing ceremony Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” What a jerk.

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed has had the honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

Instead, all such compartmentalization was ended when Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in late 1999. In his memoir Weill brags that he and Republican Senator Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.”

Gramm left the Senate to become a top executive at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which like Citigroup ran into deep trouble. Leach—former Republican Representative James Leach—was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where his banking skills could serve the needs of intellectuals. Robert Rubin, the Clinton administration treasury secretary who helped push through the Citigroup Authorization Act, was the most blatant double dealer of all: He accepted a $15-million-a-year offer from Weill to join Citigroup, where he eventually helped run the corporation into the ground.

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage–based securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Weill himself bailed out shortly before the crash. His retirement from what was then the world’s largest financial conglomerate was chronicled in the New York Times under the headline “Laughing All the Way From the Bank.” The article told of “an enormous wooden plaque” in the bank’s headquarters that featured a likeness of Weill with the inscription “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.”

That’s the man the American Academy of Arts & Sciences now honors, among others, for “extraordinary accomplishment and a call to serve.” Disgusting.

http://www.thenation.com/article/167...sanford-weill#

Funny you should say that, WSJ has him turning about face on the subject.

Sandy Weill’s About-Face on Big Banks

Sandy Weill, the man who created the mammoth financial combination of Citicorp and Travelers, has had a change of heart.

“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” Weill told CNBC this morning.

Stop. Take that in.

This is more than a change of heart. That’s a heart transplant.

Go back 14 years to the key point in Weill’s career.

It was April 1998 when the news broke: Weill’s insurance and securities giant Travelers would merge with the banking giant Citigroup.

Here is how The Wall Street Journal described the merger at that time, with some help from Sallie Krawcheck, at that point a well-known banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein and not yet the boss of Citigroup’s brokerage arm:

The proposed marriage of a commercial bank with global reach and a major insurance and securities company also challenges long-held notions about what U.S.-based banks, brokers and insurers can do. The once-derided concept of a financial-services supermarket is back with a vengeance and analysts said almost any linkup seems possible. “There is a belief in the market that this is the merger heard ’round the world’ and it very well may be,” said Sallie Krawcheck, an analyst who follows securities firms for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “These guys are looking at financial services 10 years down the road and shaping the company to take advantage of it.”

The financial world saw the new Citigroup as essentially a dare for lawmakers still hesitant to repeal Glass-Steagall. A year and a half later, Congress got rid of the Depression-era law amid intense lobbying from the financial world. An example of Weill’s own involvement comes from a WSJ story ahead of the 1999 vote.

Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and head of the powerful Senate Banking Committee told a Citigroup lobbyist, in the heat of the final battles, to “get Sandy Weill on the phone right now. Tell him to call the White House and get [them] moving or I’m going to shut this conference down,” WSJ wrote. President Bill Clinton eventually agreed to ditch the restrictions.

Today, following a financial crisis that was at least inflamed by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and after Citigroup itself took a bailout, Weill said that by breaking up banks, they would be “much” more profitable.

“This is what all the regional banks do and everybody says buy regional banks,” he said. “They’ll just be bigger regional banks.”

A Citigroup spokeswoman declined to comment Wednesday.

Krawcheck again is in place to sum up the feelings. On Twitter today she wrote: “Ok, this is a wow.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/07/2...-on-big-banks/

You spoiled my 'follow-up post' strategy. Anyway, that's why I brought it up. Talk about 'I've got mine'. Now he's out and safe he's shouting from the sidelines: "You're doing it all wrong!" Except, ofcourse, he was instrumental at bringing this about.

Some people just have no shame whatsoever ...

It is pretty shameful. He should turn over all the money he made off that deal as CEO for the years he was there.

Also, you're not the only one who reads the news

[elmicker]

It'll be good in the short term because people won't be spending x amount of their disposible income servicing interest repayments

with the base rate at 0.5% this isn't what you want. unless you're one of those eejits who got a fixed rate 100% mortgage in 2006-2009 and is now in negative equity, interest on your debt won't be that significant.