Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Present Franklin Delano Roosevelt Signing the Glass-Steagall Act on June 16, 1933
Last week members of both the House and Senate were issuing press releases to express their outrage over the sneaky repeal of a Dodd-Frank financial reform provision meant to stop giant Wall Street banks from using FDIC-insured bank affiliates to make wild gambles in derivatives, thus putting the U.S. economy in grave danger again and the taxpayer at risk for another behemoth bailout.
What was the Federal regulator of these very same banks doing? It was bragging in a press release issued at the end of the same week about the gargantuan risks these insured banks were taking in derivatives.
The press release was issued on Friday, December 19, 2014 by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the regulator of all national banks which is mandated to make sure that insured banks “operate in a safe and sound manner.”
The press release begins with a bizarre sounding headline for a bank regulator: “OCC Reports Third Quarter Trading Revenue of $5.7 Billion.” It wasn’t actually the OCC that had this trading revenue, of course, it was that “Insured U.S. commercial banks and savings institutions reported trading revenue of $5.7 billion in the third quarter of 2014” and year-to-date trading revenue of $18.3 billion, as the press release explains.
In a sane financial world, of course, insured banks are not supposed to be trading; they are supposed to be receiving insured deposits backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer in return for making loans to worthy businesses and consumers in order to create jobs and grow our economy.
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