And they copycat Adolf Hitler, must mean Hitler supporters are in power
LIBERATOR
happy by it. Krupp loved Adolf like a brother! Greed has no place in a
harmonious society, it's destructive in its form of competition.
Hitler did this to all industrys not just the financial.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125781175800739933.html
NOVEMBER 11, 2009 Curbing Size of Big Firms
Bills Would Set Limits on Financial Companies to Alleviate Risk
By DAMIAN PALETTA and MICHAEL R. CRITTENDEN
Democrats are advancing proposals in Congress designed to limit the
size and complexity of financial companies so that any collapse
wouldn't damage the broader economy, a sign that lawmakers are
responding to anti-Wall Street sentiment by toughening the
administration's rewrite of finance rules.
The proposals would allow the government to break up healthy financial
companies, and in some cases, would reassert rigid demarcations within
finance that were cleared away in 1999, such as barring commercial
banking firms and investment banking firms from merging.
Large financial companies, and even some Obama administration
officials, are nervously watching the debate. Lobbyists for large
financial-services companies, including J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank
of America Corp., Prudential Financial Inc., and MetLife Inc.
scrambled in recent days to reach out to Capitol Hill aides, people
familiar with the matter said.
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Associated Press
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act, passed
in 1933, separating commercial and investment banking.
Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D., Pa.), a top lawmaker on the House Financial
Services Committee, plans to offer an amendment to the bank-regulation
bill currently before Congress that would allow the government to take
preemptive steps limiting the size, complexity or risk of any
financial company. Officials could intervene if specific conditions
are met that signal a company poses a threat to the economy.
"I see it as one of our potentially last chances to get control,
particularly of financial institutions in their mega-forms, before
they take over the world," Rep. Kanjorski said. "It's a natural drive
of capitalism to escape control and escape regulation and to keep
growing to any size."
Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D., Colo.) is working on a separate amendment that
would allow bank regulators to impose restrictions prohibiting certain
companies from operating both a commercial bank and an investment bank
if capital reserves fall below a certain level. "You've got to be able
to make sure that the very speculative parts of the financial
community can be separated from those parts that have to run every day
and are not exciting," he said.
It's not clear that the provisions will make it into a final law,
although they have the support of House Financial Services Committee
Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.). Rep. Kanjorski said he has been
approached by Democrats and Republicans expressing support, But
Treasury officials and large banks could lobby to water the language
down. The proposals by Reps. Kanjorski and Perlmutter will face a key
test next week when Rep. Frank's panel holds votes on both.
"We take [the proposed amendments] very seriously," said Rob Nichols,
president of the Financial Services Forum, whose members are large
financial institutions. "We're talking to [lawmakers] about why
preemptively breaking up large financial institutions is very ill-
advised."
Former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, a professor at
Columbia Business School, said it was "a huge mistake for the
government to think it knows the best size of financial institutions."
At the same time, he acknowledged that financial institutions are
encouraged to get too big "because they are likely to be bailed out."
The Obama administration recently said it supported a bill giving the
Federal Reserve limited powers to force companies to sell assets or
stop certain activities if the firm's size or scope threatens the
broader economy. The White House didn't support these powers several
months ago.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) plans
Tuesday to unveil his version of a regulatory revamp. He is expected
to stop short of calling for limits on the size or scope of financial
institutions, but will likely call for new capital requirements for
companies whose size, complexity, or risk threaten financial markets.
For decades, commercial banks and investment banks were not allowed to
be owned by the same company, a legacy of Depression-era financial
regulation. That law, known as the Glass-Steagall Act, was swept away
in 1999 at the height of Washington's deregulation of financial
markets. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed Glass-Steagall and made
it much easier to create financial supermarkets.
President Barack Obama decried Gramm-Leach-Bliley on the campaign
trail, blaming it for helping fuel the financial crisis. In recent
months, several notable financial experts including former Federal
Reserve Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan have called in
different ways for limits on the size or scope of financial companies.
Treasury Department officials would prefer to impose constraints on
specific companies by, for example, increasing the amount of capital
they need to hold in reserve to cover potential losses. Treasury
officials are pushing to give the U.S. the power to seize and dissolve
large, collapsing financial companies, seeking to avoid the disastrous
consequences of Lehman Bros. near-failure.
Lawmakers have taken the debate a step further, asking whether
financial companies should be allowed to grow so large in the first
place.