Angelides : Break 'Em Up

Barry, My Liege :

The man who wrote the book on bank failure, Phil Angelides, has called for breaking up the big banks.

'If the largest banks can only be run so recklessly that they harm the economy as well as themselves, they should be broken up, Angelides said in a talk at the Center for National Policy, an independent Washington D.C. think tank.“By 2011, the top 10 banks in this country held 77 percent of the nation’s banking assets. The top five banks – JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman [Sachs] and Morgan Stanley – held $7.9 trillion in assets and 95 percent of the $304 billion in [OTC] derivatives held by U.S. bank holding companies,” Angelides said.

“These banks are too big to fail. They’re too big to manage. They’re too big to regulate. They’re too complex to understand and they’re too risky to exist. And the bottom line is they offer very little benefit,” Angelides added.'[Reuters, June 12]

He then called for breaking them up into smaller banks that would not pose a risk to the economy.

Here's my take, My Liege:

Banks should be allowed to fail. Make the depositors whole through the FDIC and then let the shareholders go through bankruptcy.

When Jamie Dimon says the Volcker Rule would have prevented the risky trade at his bank as he did in Congressional testimony, then we know the Volcker Rule is fatally flawed, and that is only because Jamie Dimon supports it.

Big banks are a danger to the economic national security of the United States.

Your faithful servant,