Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

“Big Finance as a giant exotic vine”

Lynn Parramore [ht: ja], in reviewing Rana Foroohar’s forthcoming book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of American Finance and the Fall of American Business, presents a memorable image (straight out of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors):

Foroohar’s book explains how our financial system stopped funding new ideas and projects and started extracting precious resources from Main Street. Her writing leaves a vivid impression that once the financial wizards get their way, nobody is safe, from the young college grad next door drowning in debt owed to predatory lenders to the child halfway around the world whose dinner fell victim to commodities speculation.

As I turned the pages, I began to imagine Big Finance as a giant exotic vine from some florid disaster movie that has grown out of control, creeping onto the roofs of our houses, reaching into the food on our plates, tightening its hold on our wallets—even taking over our minds. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I hear phrases like “human capital” and “return on investment” issuing from my own lips: finance-originated concepts used to describe relationships and activities that have little to do with spreadsheets.

Still, it’s not quite as dramatic as Matt Taibbi’s reference to Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Out of the mouths of. . .Fed officials

“Goldman Sachs Republican” Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has warned that the biggest banks in the United States “are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”

Although TBTF [Too Big to Fail] banks were not the sole cause of the recent financial crisis and Great Recession, there is no question that their presence at the center of our financial system contributed significantly to the magnitude of the crisis and to the extensive damage it inflicted across the economy. . .

Going forward

I believe we need to complete the important work that my colleagues are doing so that, at a minimum, we are as prepared as we can be to deal with an individual large bank failure. But given the enormous costs that would be associated with another financial crisis and the lack of certainty about whether these new tools would be effective in dealing with one, I believe we must seriously consider bolder, transformational options. Some other Federal Reserve policymakers have noted the potential benefits to considering more transformational measures. I believe we must begin this work now and give serious consideration to a range of options, including the following:

• Breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities.
• Turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).
• Taxing leverage throughout the financial system to reduce systemic risks wherever they lie.

I’m curious to see what liberal critics of Bernie Sanders have to say about Kashkari’s analysis.

Goldman Sachs strikes again

Apparently, Goldman Sachs has developed a new high-speed algorithm capable of performing over 10,000 ethical violations per second [ht: sm]

NEW YORK—Calling it a major breakthrough that will significantly expedite and streamline its daily operations, Wall Street financial firm Goldman Sachs revealed Thursday it has developed a new high-speed algorithm that is capable of performing more than 10,000 ethical violations per second. “With this new automated program, we’ll be able to systematically deceive investors, engage in conflicts of interest, and execute thousands of other blatantly unethical dealings in the time it takes to press a button,” said John Waldron, co-head of Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division, who added that the high-frequency impropriety system will be able to break more rules in a minute than an entire floor of morally suspect securities traders, financial analysts, and portfolio managers could over the course of a week. “In the past, if one of our brokers wanted to exploit a questionably legal regulatory loophole or breach the covenant of good faith with an investment client, that would require hours of manually contravening the basic principles of professional integrity. But this innovative system will allow millions of such transgressions to go through every single day. Going forward, I expect this revolutionary program to be the cornerstone of our business.” Upon learning of the advanced new unethical algorithm, investors initiated a buying frenzy on Goldman Sachs stock, sending share prices surging more than 30 percent to $245.46.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention