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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
News / Biz BofA out of touch with reality
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:39 PM
Yeah!! Traders and bankers at Charlotte-based Bank of America are getting $4 billion in bonuses. Woo hoo!
Wait.A.Minute. What?! Are they paying any attention to what's going on in the world? Hell no. Of course they aren't. They barely even seen the real world from their perches in their giant towers.
AND, get this: Not only are they bolstering the bank accounts of their top execs, they're back to the same 'ol games that nearly destroyed our country's economy.
Obama’s banking czar just delivered his reform proposal, and the big banks finally have something to snicker about—because he’s leaving untouched the risky trades that played a leading role in the financial crisis.At first, at least, it sounded so promising: After months of being ignored by President Obama and his senior staff about how to prevent another financial meltdown, economic adviser Paul Volcker got his due. The former Fed chairman’s plan to prevent banks from having their risky trading activities subsidized by the taxpayer was being taken seriously, finally, by the man who matters most to Washington, the president, who has endorsed what is being called the Volcker Rule as the centerpiece of his bank regulatory agenda.
But looking deeper, one soon discovers that “The Volcker Plan” isn’t much of a reform plan at all. (Congressional staffers cannot even get details of the proposal and have been directed by the White House to press releases.) Instead, what we are left with is a series of statements made by a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided Volcker about how he wants new legislation that would prohibit banks that are considered “too big to fail”—i.e., Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase—from engaging in so-called proprietary trading activities. This means they would no longer be able to use firm capital to make wild bets in esoteric markets, the kind of stuff that allegedly caused the financial collapse of 2008.
Read more from The Daily Beast's Charlie Gasparino here.
Click here for more on Bank of America's outlandish bonuses from The Charlotte Business Journal.
In other out-of-touch news from Qcitymetro.com: Judge decides hiring at BofA is biased
Former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer was on The Colbert Report last night discussing the banking industry ... and he was right on.
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