Mary Jo White

If I were a bankster, I'd be feeling a bit nervous this morning.

The capitalists' complaint

In graphic form.

Burning down the house

This morning I found myself in an odd position while reading Greg Smith's fuck you resignation letter op ed in the NY Times.  I bow to no man in my desire to see banksters like Blankfein chased through the streets of lower Manhattan by angry investors and drowning homeowners carrying burning torches.  And yet...

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work. 

Um...bullshit.  Smith, who is in his mid-thirties and has been earning millions from G-S for years is either naive or has his own scam going.  First of all, the timing -- this is about the time when bonus checks clear.  But even more to the point, I don't recall Wall Street ever being confused with a Buddhist retreat.  I don't believe G-S was considered some sort of paragon of virtue even before they went public, and certainly not since -- which happened around the time Mr. Smith joined the company.  And they've been mentoring candidates for 100 years To Make Money and to mentor others To Make Money.   Those interns are there not for the teamwork and spirit of humility, but to make a lot of money.   I'm guessing Smith did all right because of that, up until this crisis of confidence.  Perhaps, like Mitt Romney, they only talked about ripping the eyes out of their client muppets in "quiet rooms" when Smith joined the firm.  

And clients who came to Smith to buy derivatives knew G-S was making money on the deal -- they likely prided themselves on their own sophistication because they also figured they'd make money off the deal, too.  That's kind of how it works.  It ain't pretty, but pretty's for losers.

I think Felix Salmon responded best:

Smith has been in this business for 12 years, and he’s done extremely well by it. And to a certain extent, if the people who work for him are constantly asking how good a deal is for Goldman, rather than how good the deal is for Goldman’s clients, then that’s because of the example he set. What’s missing in his op-ed is any sense of mea culpa, any sense that he was at all part of the problem.

There’s a strong smell of faux-naive coming from Smith’s op-ed. “Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing,” he writes. “Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.” Here’s a question for him: back when he made videos for Goldman urging candidates to join the company, were the people who got promoted those who had ideas and did the right thing? Or were they the ones who made lots of money for the firm? To ask the question is to answer it.

So let’s not pretend to be shocked that the most successful bankers are the ones who make the most money off their clients. And let’s not try to imply that the solution to this problem lies at the Goldman Sachs board level. It doesn’t. The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

 I look forward to Greg Smith joining the Occupy Wall Street movement (it's been very warm here in the Northeast, so his timing on this is pretty good, too). 

This is not the Tea Party

If you're looking up from the pages of the Wall Street Journal editing page, and wondering what all the kerfuffle is about, this may help to enlighten you.

Via TNC.

Swapping his constituents

I know the financial industry owns Congress. But rarely does one see the triumph of self-interest and ideology over the interest of his constituents.

Jefferson County, Alabama purchased derivatives to pay for their $3.1 billion (!) sewer system. Now that those derivatives have gone kerplooyey, it may be the largest municipality to declare bankruptcy.

Though the county no longer has to pay fees to JPMorgan — the bank agreed to void the swaps as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission — its bond debt for the sewers now totals almost $4 billion. The Birmingham News described Jefferson County as a “poster child” for all that can go wrong when municipalities start playing with unregulated derivatives peddled by Wall Street sharpies.

Has Spencer Bachus, as the local congressman, decried this debacle? Of course — what local congressman wouldn’t? In a letter last year to Mary Schapiro, the chairwoman of the S.E.C., he said that the county’s financing schemes “magnified the inherent risks of the municipal finance market.” (He also blamed, among other things, “serious corruption,” of which there was plenty, including secret payments by JPMorgan to people who could influence the county commissioners.)

Bachus is not just your garden variety local congressman, though. As chairman of the Financial Services Committee, he is uniquely positioned to help make sure that similar disasters never happen again — not just in Jefferson County but anywhere. After all, the new Dodd-Frank financial reform law will, at long last, regulate derivatives. And the implementation of that law is being overseen by Bachus and his committee.

Among its many provisions related to derivatives — all designed to lessen their systemic risk — is a series of rules that would make it close to impossible for the likes of JPMorgan to pawn risky derivatives off on municipalities. Dodd-Frank requires sellers of derivatives to take a near-fiduciary interest in the well-being of a municipality.

You would think Bachus would want these regulations in place as quickly as possible, given the pain his constituents are suffering. Yet, last week, along with a handful of other House Republican bigwigs, he introduced legislation that would do just the opposite: It would delay derivative regulation until January 2013.

It is hard not to see this move as an act of hostility toward any derivative regulation. After all, by 2013 a presidential election will have taken place, and if the Republicans take the White House and the Senate, one can expect that the next step would be to roll back derivative regulation entirely. Even if it is just about delay, rather than outright obstruction, that means the Republicans are asking for two more years during which the industry will add trillions of dollars worth of “financial weapons of mass destruction” (to use Warren Buffett’s famous description) to the $466.8 trillion of unregulated derivatives already in existence. How can this possibly be good?

They own us, and they used our money to make the purchase

Well, this is basically moot, but I was struck by a couple of stories the past two days. Yesterday, Gretchen Morgenson could barely conceal her rage.

HOW the truth shines through when you shed a little light on a subject.

Such is the message from the massive document drop the Federal Reserve made last week. The Dodd-Frank law forced the Fed to disclose the recipients of $3.3 trillion from emergency lending programs put in place during the crisis days of 2008, so the taxpayers who paid for those rescue efforts now know whom they were helping.

Not that we should expect to receive any thank-you notes from these institutions for rescuing them from themselves.

Still, it’s good to know who got what at the bailout banquet. This helps us understand how expensive it is to live in a nation where big, politically interconnected financial institutions are not allowed to fail — even after they mess up in the most catastrophic of ways.

The Fed data showed that the biggest recipient of taxpayer assistance was, naturally, Citigroup. It was followed closely by Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. Goldman Sachs was also a large beneficiary during the darkest moments of 2008.

Remember that the Wall Street firms were imperiled by their excessive use of borrowed money, which generated huge paydays when the cost of those funds was cheap and the values of the assets they were buying were rising at a steady clip. After the bubble burst and financing evaporated, the firms were able to tap into a lending program created by the Fed in mid-March 2008 after Bear Stearns collapsed. It was called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility.

The program allowed firms to borrow at low interest rates — ranging from 3.25 percent when the program began to 0.5 percent when the last loan was made in May 2009. The firms had to post various securities as collateral when they borrowed, and some of those securities were risky indeed.

[...]

All of the emergency lending data released by the Fed are highly revealing, but why weren’t they made public much earlier? That’s a question that Walker F. Todd, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, is asking.

Mr. Todd, a former assistant general counsel and research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, said details about the Fed’s vast and various programs should have been available before the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law was even written.

“The Fed’s current set of powers and the shape of the Dodd-Frank bill over all might have looked quite different if this information had been made public during the debate on the bill,” he said. “Had these tables been out there, I think Congress would have either said no to emergency lending authority or if you get it, it’s going to be a much lower number — half a trillion dollars in the aggregate.”

Better late with the data than never, of course. And the release of these figures just ahead of Friday’s grim employment data — the jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent in November — makes them even more compelling. Clearly, the federal government was much more willing to deliver mountains of money to big banks that made big mistakes than it was to lend a financial hand to rank-and-file Americans struggling through foreclosures.

Federal officials have always argued that plowing money into errant banks and trading shops was the best way to rescue the economy, but to Edward J. Kane, professor of economics at Boston College, details of the Fed’s largess are reminiscent of a famous Winston Churchill quotation.

“Never have so few owed so much to so many, and given them so small a return,” Mr. Kane said. “We see, for example, how little these institutions have given back to troubled homeowners whose houses are threatened with foreclosure.”

[...]

From Sept. 15 through the end of that month, borrowings averaged around $100 billion a day. The interest rate charged on those loans was 2.25 percent.

Given that markets were frozen at that time, and given the dubious quality of some of the collateral posted to the Fed to back the loans, an interest rate of 10 percent would be a reasonable benchmark for measuring the size of this subsidy.

On the one hand, Citigroup, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, Goldman and the others paid roughly $75 million in interest over that September fortnight. Had the Fed charged 10 percent, the firms would have paid about $325 million. For just those firms, over only that period, that’s a $250 million subsidy.

And today...well, the juxtaposition is striking, to say the least.

Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.

At stake is a portion of the hefty annual payouts that are a familiar part of the compensation culture on Wall Street, as well as a juicy target of popular anger. If Congress does not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary.

Goldman Sachs is one of the companies discussing how to time bonus season, according to three people who have been briefed on the discussions. Pay consultants who work with major Wall Street companies say that just about every other large bank has also considered such a move in recent weeks.

The banksters are worried about unseemly appearances...so they say.

With tax politics in Washington unpredictable, bank executives have spent months sketching out several options for their bonus plans, including the possibility of an earlier payout. Lawmakers have been trading accusations across a partisan divide, but after this weekend, it appears likely that a compromise will extend the tax cuts for all income levels.

Even so, the banks’ discussions about bonus timing underscore how focused the industry is on protecting every dollar of pay.

[...]

The top five Wall Street firms have put aside nearly $90 billion for total pay this year, and they are expected to raise that amount using their end of year earnings. That would make this year one of the best ever for bank pay.

So, let's be honest. Populist rage aside, that $250 million subsidy the banks received through artificially low rates is chump change.

Chamber of Horrors

Yeah, it would be a shame if customers of some of these companies learned where the dollars they spend with them are going.

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help.

And these contributions, some of which can be pieced together through tax filings of corporate foundations and other public records, also show how the chamber has increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors to finance much of its legislative and political agenda. The chamber makes no apologies for its policy of not identifying its donors. It has vigorously opposed legislation in Congress that would require groups like it to identify their biggest contributors when they spend money on campaign ads.

Proponents of that measure pointed to reports that health insurance providers funneled at least $10 million to the chamber last year, all of it anonymously, to oppose President Obama’s health care legislation.

“The major supporters of us in health care last year were confronted with protests at their corporate headquarters, protests and harassment at the C.E.O.’s homes,” said R. Bruce Josten, the chief lobbyist at the chamber, whose office looks out on the White House. “You are wondering why companies want some protection. It is pretty clear.”

The unwashed and their ability to hurt the feelings of CEOs make it vital for the Chamber of Commerce to exist.

But it is interesting the CoC calls it, "protection." I guess it really is a racket, after all.

To support the effort, the chamber has adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to fund-raising. Mr. Josten said he makes many of the fund-raising calls to corporations nationwide, as does Mr. Donohue. (Both men are well compensated for their work: Mr. Donohue was paid $3.7 million in 2008, and has access to a corporate jet and a chauffeur, while Mr. Josten was paid $1.1 million, tax records show.)

But those aggressive pitches have turned off some business executives. “There was an arrogance to it like they were the 800-pound gorilla and I was either with them with this big number or I just did not matter,” said Mr. Tyree, of Chicago.

Another corporate executive, who asked not to be named, said the chamber risks alienating its members.

“Unless you spend $250,000 to $500,000 a year, that is what they want for you to be one of their pooh-bahs, otherwise, they don’t pay any attention to you at all,” the executive said, asking that the company not be identified.

Chamber officials acknowledge the tough fund-raising, but they say it has been necessary in support of their goal of remaking Congress on Election Day to make it friendlier to business.

Some businesses, anyway.

More of that "hopey changey" stuff

Yeah, this is a "big fucking deal," too.

The bill has been the subject of furious and expensive lobbying efforts by businesses and financial trade groups in recent months. While those efforts produced some specific exceptions to new regulations, by and large the bill’s financial regulations not only remained strong but in some cases gained strength as public outrage grew at the excesses that fueled the financial meltdown of 2008.

Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who shepherded the bill through the House, said the bill benefited from the increased attention that turned to the subject of financial regulation after Congress completed the health care bill.

“Last year when we were debating it in the house, health care was getting all of the attention and it was not as good a bill as I would have liked to bring out because we were not getting public attention,” Mr. Frank said. “What happened was with the passage of health care, the American public started to focus on this.”

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said legislators were still uncertain how the bill will work until it is in place. “But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner also praised the conference committee for its work. “All Americans have a stake in this bill,” he said. “It will offer families the protections they deserve, help safeguard their financial security and give the businesses of America access to the credit they need to expand and innovate.”

Legislators had aimed to finish their reconciliation work before President Obama travels to a G-20 meeting this weekend in Ontario, and to approve and deliver a final bill for the president’s signature by Independence Day.

At two minutes before midnight Thursday, some 14 1/2 hours after they began work Thursday morning, members of the House-Senate conference committee approved a final revision of the measure known popularly as the Volcker Rule.

The rule, named for Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who proposed the measure this year, restricts the ability of banks whose deposits are federally insured from trading for their own benefit. That measure had been fiercely opposed by banks and large Wall Street firms, who viewed it as a major incursion on some of their most profitable activities.

We can complain about all the back room dealing, but this is a pretty spectacular accomplishment. Certainly not perfect, but I really never thought they'd get this done.

Zombie stockbrokers coming to take your job, eat you

The Internets are truly a wonderful thing.

The Death Panel

Republicans like Mitch McConnell finally have a "Death Panel" to rail against, but this time they're calling it a "taxpayer bailout."

Here's the chain of events: A bank is judged failing. The FDIC submits a plan for the bank's liquidation -- which includes firing management, wiping out shareholders, handing losses to creditors, and selling off the firm -- and gets it approved by the Treasury secretary. Then the FDIC takes over the banks. The $50 billion fund is used to keep the lights on while all this happens. It's there to prevent taxpayers from having to foot the bill for the chaos that will occur between when we recognize a bank is failing and when we shut it down.

Whatever you want to call this, it isn't a bailout. It's the death of the company. And the fund is way of forcing too-big-to-fail banks to pay for the execution. But stung by Republican criticisms, the administration is telling Democrats to let the fund go. And they're not all that unhappy to see it die. "The fund isn’t a priority for the Obama administration," reported Business Week, "which instead proposed having the financial industry repay the government for the cost of disassembling a failed firm, an approach preferred by the industry."

So let's just be clear: The alternative to the liquidation fund is Wall Street's preference. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know about whether the industry really views this as a bailout.

On the Senate floor yesterday, Bob Corker, who's been unfailingly respectful of his colleagues' criticisms of the bill, had enough. "This fund that’s been set up is anything but a bailout," he said. "It’s been set up to provide upfront funding by the industry so that when these companies are seized, there’s money available to make payroll and to wind it down while the pieces are being sold off." The only question, Corker said, was whether you pre-fund by taxing the banks, which is what the Republican head of the FDIC wants and the bill does, or whether you post-fund by recouping taxpayer losses after the fact, which the Treasury Department and the industry prefer.

That -- and not bailouts -- is the debate. And by demonizing it, Republicans will force Democrats to retreat to the post-funding structure that was the original preference of both the Obama administration and the financial industry. That's not really a strike against future bailouts, though it might be something you promised a roomful of bankers you'd do on their behalf.

But, of course, I'm sure that Susan Collins can be persuaded...

Dreams are not reforms

K-thug addresses his commenters who believe that they key to financial reform is to break up the big banks so that there are none "too big to fail." Execs at smaller institutions will know, then, that they won't get bailed out if they run excessive risks. Not gonna happen says Krugman, and besides, it wasn't the big financial institutions that caused the run on the system in the 30s.

In fact, we know what a system in which banks are allowed to fail looks like: that’s how the US banking system worked before the creation of the Fed. And you know what? It wasn’t a smoothly functioning system, with sound banking enforced by market discipline; it was a system periodically wracked by “panics” that destroyed peoples’ savings and plunged the economy into recession.

Finally, because that’s what really happens when banks are allowed to fail freely, promises not to bail out banks in the future aren’t credible. Fail to reform finance now, and there will be two, three, many TARPs in our future.

What is true is that there are bailouts and then there are bailouts. What has to be protected in a crisis are bank deposits and things like bank deposits — basically, bank-created money. Money market accounts and “repo” — very short-term loans in which businesses often park their funds — have to be protected to avoid 1930-31-type collapses. On the other hand, bank shareholders and long-term bondholders can be made to pay a price without collapsing the system.

Now, in 2008-2009 the shareholders were not cleaned out, and the bondholders left untouched; in part this was a policy decision, but it was also influenced by the lack of “resolution authority”: there was no clean, well-established route for seizing complex financial institutions. We can fix that, and deal with future Citigroups (one of which, given history, is likely to be … Citigroup) the way the FDIC deals with smaller banks: protect the depositors, clean out the shareholders.

But just letting banks fail isn’t going to happen — nor should it. In practice, talking about doing so is just an excuse to avoid real reform.

Firewalls

I hadn't thought too much about the "Volker's Rules" unveiled last week -- breaking apart the major banks' retail banking and investment banking sides -- because in the era of global banking, a unilateral U.S. move might have some effect, but not enough to stop the next banking meltdown. Nevertheless, the idea made sense to me, but critics -- especially those on Wall Street -- called it empty populism by Obama. And Gordon Brown, probably speaking for other European leaders, dismissed the very idea.

But now, the head of the Bank of England has stepped forward to say he likes the plan.

LONDON — Mervyn A. King, the governor of the Bank of England, is an owlish, self-effacing man who, in contrast to his more outspoken peers in Frankfurt and Washington, strikes a public posture that borders on the demure.

But as outrage over lush banking profits gathers steam on both sides of the Atlantic, Mr. King finds himself at the vanguard of a growing movement that argues that big banks must separate their higher-risk trading and investment banking businesses from their core deposit-taking functions.

Last week, such a proposal pushed by the former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker made headway. President Obama shocked Wall Street by proposing that large banks that collect customer deposits be banned from engaging in proprietary trading activities.

At a hearing before a parliamentary treasury committee on Tuesday, Mr. King used some of his strongest language yet to support such a separation. In the process, he hailed Mr. Obama for having moved so quickly.

“The U.S. has been more open in moving to a safer banking system than we are,” he said. “After you ring-fence retail deposits, the statement that no one else gets bailed out becomes credible.”

To illustrate his point that increased regulation and higher capital requirements alone would not be sufficient to forestall another banking crisis, he pointed to Citigroup — which once was seen as a model for combining all banking functions under one roof.

“You had regulators in the building and four of the most respected people in the world running the bank,” he said, citing its architect, Sanford I. Weill; the former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin; the former International Monetary Fund official Stanley Fischer; and a veteran international banker, William Rhodes.

“They did not set out to destroy Citibank, but when you have a large complicated institution, things happen,” he said. “That is the argument for trying to create firewalls.”

Under post-Depression laws, bank holding companies in the United States were not allowed to own investment banks before 1999. But in Europe, no such division ever existed.

In fact, until last week such a notion had been roundly criticized, more a provocative debating point in an academic seminar than a practicable piece of legislation. Others speculated that the idea would surely be swatted away by muscular banking lobbies if it ever came close to becoming law.

Indeed, some see the idea, far-fetched and steeped in principle as it may be, as more an emblem of Mr. King’s own unyielding sense of what is right and what is wrong for the markets — albeit one that in this case is in tune with the public mood.

Over in Davos, Barney Frank thinks he can incorporate it into House legislation. George Soros embraces the idea as well, though he thinks it doesn't go far enough.

And the Acela has electric outlets...Oh, wait

Simon Johnson analyzes the banksters' Trains, Plains and Automobiles" non-trip to Washington last week. Obama seems like a pretty easy going guy, but I think Johnson's right: this was surely evidence of the arrogance of these pricks and is sure to come and bite them in the ass one of these days.

I'm not sure airline miles are perks

Barbara Kiviat unravels the American Bankers Assoc. press release story in the Times this morning about credit card companies threats to impose new fees and (gasp) immediate interest on purchases by their best free-loading customers.

In short: Bullshit. There is a reason that about twenty years ago card issuers went into a marketing war over "no annual fee." There is a reason they continue to send new cards to people who pay their bill in full each month, even as months grow shorter and shorter.

Their customers have options. Buying shit with credit cards is a convenience, not a necessity.