US Bankers Agree With Obama

Romney from the beginning said he will repeal the Dodd-Frank Act that Obama signed in order to punish Wall Street scammers and limit banking transactions that put Americans at risk. (June 29, 2012 Peter Madoff pled guilty to falsifying compliance reports that kept his brother Bernie’s Ponzi scam hidden from regulators; he got 10 years in prison and July 17 a Senate investigation found that the British HSBC bank allowed billions of dollars of Mexican drug cartel money to be laundered through its operations; the bank also did business with Middle East terrorists - Al Qaeda and Iran - and may lose its US banking license.)

On July 26 the Daily Finance had an article that said: Sanford "Sandy" Weill, the tycoon who built financial conglomerate Citigroup into a massive US commercial and investment bank said it is time to split up the biggest banks so they can go back to growing again. "The world changes and the world that we live in is different from the one that we lived in 10 years ago" Weill said in an interview with television network CNBC. Other long-time Wall Street players were quick to applaud Weill. Arthur Levitt, Weill's former business partner in the 1960s and a chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission in the 1990s said: "It's a very difficult statement for him to make since he was largely responsible for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and he's absolutely right. This is a very significant statement. Congress put in place limits on how large they (the banks) can get and deprived government of the ability to come in and rescue them from their mistakes" he told lawmakers at the House Financial Services Committee hearing. The Glass-Steagall law, known as "The Banking Act of 1933," was passed during the Great Depression to help restore faith in banks. It revamped the financial system, creating, for example, deposit insurance, in addition to separating commercial and investment banking. Looser regulations in the 1980s and 1990s chipped away at Glass-Steagall. But when Weill's Travelers Group, which included an insurer and the Salomon Brothers investment bank, took over Citicorp in 1998, it needed a special temporary regulatory exemption to operate those businesses together. Weill lobbied heavily for key provisions of Glass-Steagall to be repealed, a change he won in 1999. Since then, the US banking system has become considerably more concentrated. John Reed, the former chief executive of Citicorp who worked with Weill on the 1997 merger with Travelers, said in March that he (Reed) regrets his role and is astounded at the way banks continue to fight regulations to rein in risky activities. "It wasn't that there were one or two institutions that, you know, got carried away and did stupid things. It was, we all did ... and then the whole system came down," Reed said on Bill Moyers' public television show. But Weill called for far deeper changes among the major banks, noting that when investment banks are no longer eligible to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve, they can go back to innovating and growing fast.

These bankers are supporting the actions Obama has taken which means we are heading in the right direction. If you’re angry with what happened to your 40lKs and other retirement pensions or the mortgage catastrophes and bailouts you should not vote for Romney as doing business as we have in the past will eventually lead us back into another recession. Stop blaming Obama for the errors of the Republicans and big businessmen that have taken advantage of you.

While the rest of us are concerned about the economy the Republican House continued to fight for the Bush tax cuts for the rich. FYI on July 25 the US House of Representatives voted (256-171) to extend the Bush tax cuts through 2013 (Timothy Johnson of Illinois was the only Republican to vote against HR8) defying a veto threat from President Obama and rejected with a 170-257 vote the Senate’s bill (S3412) supported by Obama that would let tax cuts for top earners expire and keep the cuts for those making $250,000 or less; some are saying these actions set up a partisan showdown on fiscal policy after the November 6, 2012 election. I agree that we need a tax overhaul but the Republicans’ HR8 and HR6169 are not the answer. The Republican tax overhaul process bill (HR 6169) called – Pathway to Job Creation through a Simpler, Fairer Tax Code Act of 2012 according to Ron Paul is not the answer. Ron Paul voted ‘no’ along with Democrats and his website said it consolidates the 6 current individual income tax brackets into 2 (10% and not higher than 25%), reduces the corporate income tax rate to not more than 25%, repeals the alternative minimum tax, broadens the tax base so that tax revenues are maintained at 18-19% of the Gross Domestic Product, and reforms the current foreign taxation system; it doesn’t cut spending. This past year has proven that just because the rich have money in their pocket, doesn’t mean they’ll use it to create jobs which would in effect lower the government debt because more revenue would be coming in and less would be spent on what Republicans call entitlement programs (welfare, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc). The rich may be paying a lot of dollars in taxes but the middle class is paying more of a percentage of their income for taxes and this is not fair. If the Republicans truly wanted to improve our economy they would have addressed the Jobs Act instead of having continuing to vote on repealing ObamaCare.