On July 25, 2012, Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, writes:
If any single person is responsible for Wall Street banks becoming too big to fail it’s Sandy Weill. In 1998 he created the financial powerhouse Citigroup by combining Traveler’s Insurance and Citibank. To cash in on the combination, Weill then successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. And he hired my former colleague Bob Rubin, then Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, to oversee his new empire.
Weill created the business model that Wall Street uses to this day — unleashing traders to make big, risky bets with other peoples’ money that deliver gigantic bonuses when they turn out well and cost taxpayers dearly when they don’t. And Weill made a fortune – as did all the other executives and traders. JPMorgan and Bank of America soon followed Weill’s example with their own mega-deals, and their bonus pools exploded as well.
Citigroup was bailed out in 2008, as was much of the rest of the Street, but that didn’t alter the business model in any fundamental way. The Street neutered the Dodd-Frank act that was supposed to stop the gambling. JPMorgan, headed by one of Weill’s protégés, Jamie Dimon, just lost $5.8 billion on some risky bets. Dimon continues to claim that giant banks like his can be managed so as to avoid any risk to taxpayers.
Sandy Weill has finally seen the light. It’s a bit late in the day, but, hey, he’s already cashed in. You and I and millions of others in the United States and elsewhere around the world are still paying the price.
What’s the betting that one of the presidential candidates will take up Weill’s proposal?
Reich and other influencial economists should read Harold Moulton’s “The Formation Of Capital,” in which he argues that it makes no sense to finance new productive capital out of past savings. Instead, economic growth should be financed out of future earnings (savings), and provide that every citizen become an owner. The Federal Reserve, which has been largely responsible for the powerlessness of most American citizens, should set an example for all the central banks in the world. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke and other members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn’t enough savings in the system to finance economic growth. We should not destroy the Federal Reserve or make it a political extension of the Treasury Department, but instead reform it so that the American citizens in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Regions become the owners. The result will be that money power will flow from the bottom up, not from the top down––not for consumer credit, not for credit that doesn’t pay for itself or non-productive uses of credit, but for credit for productive uses to expand the economy’s rate of growth.
