Richard (RJ) Eskow - JPMorgan Chase: Break Up The Big Banks Now. Here’s How.

When Jamie Dimon revealed that JPMorgan Chase had lost billions through risky and legally questionable trading, he said the losses would be about $2 billion and maybe more. Apparently it is more - a lot more. People in a position to know are saying the real figure is probably in the $5-7 billion range.

The JPMorgan Chase scandal - and yes, it is a scandal - shows us why we need to break up the big banks as quickly as possible.

But that won't happen unless we can get our hands around the real scope of the problem, which is probably far greater than we're being told. That means cutting through the enveloping shroud of jargon, euphemisms and double talk - "crap," if you will - that keeps us from seeing the situation as it really is.

Here's why we need to do it, and here's how.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/jpmorgan-chase-break-big-banks-now-here-s-how-1337698419

Dean Baker - Mortgage and Securitization Fraud: Where Is the Task Force?

It was almost four years ago that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paul Paulson, and then New York Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner ran to Congress warning that the end of the world was near. They told members of Congress that the banks were drowning in bad debt and without a massive bailout they would soon be forced into bankruptcy. Congress quickly coughed up the money in the form of $700 billion in TARP loans. The Fed contributed trillions more.

Undoubtedly most of the bad debt was due to stupidity, which does not seem to be in short supply on Wall Street despite the high paychecks. The folks running the major banks somehow could not see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. The fact that house prices had risen by more than 70 percent above their trend level, with no plausible explanation in the fundamentals of the housing market, did not trouble these high-flyers.

But there was more than just stupidity involved here. There was an epidemic of mortgage fraud that was identified by the FBI as early as 2004. The general story was that the big subprime issuers were pushing their agents to issue as many mortgages as possible, because they knew that they could sell almost any mortgage the next day in the secondary market. As a result, many mortgage agents put down information that they knew to be false, often changing information provided by applicants to allow borrowers to get mortgages for which they were not actually qualified.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Mortgage-and-Securitizatio-by-Dean-Baker-120522-871.html

Ellen Brown - Cooperative Banking, the Exciting Wave of the Future

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In 'New Economic Visions', a special five-part AlterNet series edited by Economics Editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

According to both the Mayan and Hindu calendars, 2012 (or something very close) marks the transition from an age of darkness, violence and greed to one of enlightenment, justice and peace. It’s hard to see that change just yet in the events relayed in the major media, but a shift does seem to be happening behind the scenes; and this is particularly true in the once-boring world of banking.

In the dark age of Kali Yuga, money rules; and it is through banks that the moneyed interests have gotten their power. Banking in an age of greed is fraught with usury, fraud and gaming the system for private ends. But there is another way to do banking; the neighborly approach of George Bailey in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Rather than feeding off the community, banking can feed the community and the local economy. 

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155454/cooperative_banking%2C_the_exciting_wave_of_the_future

The Bank Runs In Greece Will Soon Be Followed By Bank Runs In Other European Nations

The bank runs that we are watching right now in Greece are shocking, but they are only just the beginning.  Since May 6th, nearly one billion dollars has been withdrawn from Greek banks.  For a small nation like Greece, that is an absolutely catastrophic number.  At this point, the entire Greek banking system is in danger of collapsing.  If you had money in a Greek bank, why wouldn't you pull it out?  If Greece leaves the euro, all euros in Greek banks will likely be converted to drachmas, and the value of those drachmas will almost certainly decline dramatically.  In fact, it has been estimated that Greek citizens could see the value of their bank accounts decline by up to 50 percent if Greece leaves the euro.  So if you had money in a Greek bank, it would only make sense to withdraw it and move it to another country as quickly as possible.  And as the eurozone begins to unravel, this is a scenario that we are going to see play out in country after country.  As member nations leave the eurozone, you would be a fool to have your euros in Italian banks or Spanish banks when you could have them in German banks instead.  So the bank runs that are happening in Greece right now are only a preview of things to come.  Before this crisis is over we are going to see bank runs happening all over Europe.

If Greece leaves the euro, the consequences are likely to be quite messy.  Those that are promoting the idea that a "Grexit" can be done in an orderly fashion are not being particularly honest.  The following is from a recent article in the Independent....

Read More:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-bank-runs-in-greece-will-soon-be-followed-by-bank-runs-in-other-european-nations

Richard (RJ) Eskow - Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase: Why It's the Scandal of Our Time

They're missing the point. When CEO Jamie Dimon announced that JPMorgan Chase had incurred at least $2 billion in losses from risky, unsecured, derivatives-types trading, it uncovered the scandal of our time once and for all.

The Chase disaster gives us a much-needed a glimpse into our corrupt political system, its Wall Street paymasters, and the media voices that allow people like Dimon to escape scrutiny.

The JPMorgan Chase story is the story behind the financial crisis that has thrown millions of people out of work. It's the story behind our ever-growing wealth inequity. It's the story behind Washington's inability to prosecute criminal bankers, regulate reckless ones, and propose the economic solutions the rest of us urgently need.

Predictably, the pundits who aid and abet people like Jamie Dimon are dismissing this story's importance, pointing out that $2 billion (it could become much more) pales against the $19 billion in profit Chase reported last year.

But it was potentially $2 billion earned through crime. And more importantly, this story isn't just about Chase's errors and crimes. It's much bigger than that.

Besides, $19 billion in a single year? That's a big part of the story, too.

The Case Against Chase, its CEO, and its accomplices is too big to cover all at once. Here are the aspects of this under-reported story we plan to address in the days and weeks to come.

The Firm

Depending on the day and the measurement used, JPMorgan Chase is now the largest or second-largest bank in the world. Its Japan operation alone has been cited by that nation's regulators as a systemic risk because of its size.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Jamie-Dimon-s-JPMorgan-Cha-by-Richard--RJ-Esko-120515-853.html

Siv O'Neall - "We do not want to die in the rubble of neoliberalism!"

It seems perfectly clear that Roosevelt didn't implement the various reforms to get out of the Great Depression from any excessive sense of charity (even though he was most likely a basically sound man) but really in order to save Capitalism. That's a well-known fact and Pierre Larrouturou's founding of Roosevelt 2012 does not to me make him a Messiah. However, through his reforms, FDR did save millions of people from lives in poverty, hunger and misery. He implemented new work relief programs - the WPA (Work Projects Administration) and also banking reforms, the 'Emergency Banking Act' and several other social reforms.

If, however, you hesitate to call Roosevelt a people's man (as I do), just compare Roosevelt to Obama or his predecessors! And when, for that matter, would a revolutionary man or woman be elected President of the United States? It's clear that Roosevelt was a realist, not a flaming revolutionary.

Systems often hold longer than we think, but they end up by collapsing much faster than we imagine. "In those few words, the former chief economist of the IMF International, Kenneth Rogoff, sums up the situation of the global economy. As the Governor of the Bank of England, he asserts that "the next crisis may be worse than 1930" ...

Read More:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/43160

Robert Reich - How J.P. Morgan Chase has Made the Case for Breaking Up the Big Banks and Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.”

Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again.

Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule — creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/how-jp-morgan-chase-has-made-case-breaking-big-banks-and-resurrecting-glass-steagall-1336830881

Sam Pizzigati - No Country for Rich Men

Back in 1863, a short story took the American reading public by storm. Edward Everett Hale's The Man without a Country told the tale of a poor treasonous soul sentenced to spend the rest of his life endlessly sailing the world in perpetual exile, as a prisoner aboard Navy warships

Today's awesomely affluent are just as transient — by choice.

Take Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. This billionaire renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2011, a move perfectly timed to potentially save him hundreds of millions in taxes when Facebook goes public.

Saverin has plenty of company. The number of Americans who formally renounced their U.S. citizenship soared to 1,780 last year from 235 in 2008.

The spark for this surge? U.S. tax officials ave been clamping down on overseas tax evasion. This bit of unpleasantness has some wealthy Americans, such as the Brazilian-born Saverin, cutting their ties to dear old Uncle Sam. They simply pay a $450 paperwork fee and an "exit tax" on unrealized capital gains, if they hold assets worth over $2 million or have paid over $151,000 to the IRS in any recent year.

Read More:

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/no_country_for_rich_men

John Feffer - Waiting for Copernicus: On the Slow-Death of Neoliberalism

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. “Wall Street’s financial meltdown marks the end of an era,” wrote Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers in Counterpunch at the end of 2008. “What has ended is the credibility of the Washington Consensus – open markets to foreign investors and tight money austerity programs (high interest rates and credit cutbacks) to ‘cure’ balance-of-payments deficits, domestic budget deficits and price inflation. 

Read More:

http://www.fpif.org/articles/waiting_for_copernicus

Elizabeth Parisian - The Most Powerful Company You've Never Heard of: Meet CME Group

Think of powerful, multi-billion dollar corporations, and many come readily to mind. Wal-Mart. General Electric. Exxon Mobil. Bank of America. McDonald's. Apple. We recognize their logos, know what they sell and how to buy it -- or how to not buy it if we choose.

But for all their riches and ubiquity, when it comes to sheer raw power, these high-profile behemoths are eclipsed by a company that most of us have never heard of.

Meet CME Group. Last fall, Forbes revealed "The Four Companies That Control the 147 Companies That Own Everything," in which contributor Brendan Coffey argues that "the real power to control the world" lies not with the likes of Wal-Mart and Bank of America, but with the select few companies that control the indexes that rank these corporations. CME Group, owner of the Dow Jones Indexes, is one of these four companies, which is why it is important for all of us to get to know this company, how it makes its billions, and how it impacts us all.

The "CME" in "CME Group" stands for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which has special significance for those of us who live in Chicago. We're familiar with "The Merc" and the Chicago Board of Trade, the two iconic commodities futures exchanges comprising Chicago's Wall Street. (And if you're not from Chicago, you've likely seen the trading floor of Board of Trade -- featured in the classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off). CME Group formed relatively recently, when the Mercantile Exchange bought the Board of Trade in 2007. But a five-year growth and acquisition spree has secured its status as one of the four masters of the corporate universe.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/07-8