We've Been Robbed!

[Betsy3491]

Hello,

I've attached an essay by my friend C.M. Robertson, who has been reading about recent abuses perpetrated by our banks and has written an insightful essay on this topic. If you're interested, I've attached the essay.View attachment

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Hello,

I've attached an essay by my friend C.M. Robertson, who has been reading about recent abuses perpetrated by our banks and has written an insightful essay on this topic. If you're interested, I've attached the essay.View attachment 25633

as a liberal you lack the IQ to say what the most significant abuse is but you're sure such an abuse exists -right??

See why we are 100% positive a liberal will be slow.

 

[AmazonTania]

Just reading through and two things:

The merging between investment banks and commercial banks is most likely what saved most banks during the crisis. Allowing banks to merge means you are able to hedge your investments from things like a housing/market crash. If you've backed your 401k in only USD, you would have been whipped out, as an investment bank would have also be able to back your savings in other securities, commodities, currencies, even Gold. Without being able to diversify, many investors would have lost alot more. So no, Glass Steagall really has nothing to do with why banks take on risky investments.

By eliminating “off balance sheet” accounting, I'm assuming you mean Shadow Banking. That's already very much illegal and was illegal even before the crisis, however the FED typically allows this by allowing banks to pool resources at the Federal Reserve and paying the banks interests on their pooling. This is done even to this day and the Government allows this.

I'm going to keep reading more.

 

[Two Thumbs]

yeah, Im not downloading anything.

Please feel free to c-p anything you think is important

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

By eliminating “off balance sheet” accounting,

This is one I have to agree with. Even after Sarbanes Oxley accounting was so bad or so comnplex no one knew if financial institutions were in trouble or not. The president of BB&T, for example, has said that no one can understand the Bank of America financial statements including himself. Robert Rubin said he had no idea what was going on at Citbank despite being vice chairman!!

The whole idea of accounting is to make a businesses condition very very transparent so owners, potential owners, customers, and regulators can know exactly what is going on. Instead accounting BS has grown much like tax code BS so it does the oppposite of whats intended. THe crisis could have been easily averted if we had had useful information.

Worse still, very very few have any concept of what accounting is, and its not really a political issue so its impossible to know where reform might begin! Tell you Congressman to bug the SEC so they can bug FASB to make financial statements readable and useful to average HS graduates?