I have maintained for a long time that nothing is changing in the financial system--we are being left with the same basic game and the same people who are running the game. And, indeed, led by J.P. Morgan's Jamie Dimon--who was, for a very long time, a go-to guy on Wall Street for the Administration--there is a concerted move to blow up new global rules for financial institutions.
Which is precisely why we need OccupyWallStreet.
The Financial Times gives some insight yesterday with this piece:
The industry is preparing a full-on assault on a deal regulators see as the best way to prevent future financial meltdown – and the question is whether the accord will be left with enough teeth.
The rules...
Basel III, named after the Swiss-based international committee of regulators that issued the rules, is a complex package of reforms designed to make banks more resilient and less likely to need taxpayer rescue in future. It forces all lenders – particularly the largest – to build up buffers of equity, cash and liquid assets to protect themselves against unexpected losses or another market crisis.[emphasis added]
Leading the charge against these new rules--which would try to lower the risks of another financial calamity ignited by greed and incompetence of the people running institutions--was none other than J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a guy who truly was at the center of the financial crisis and yet still is reaping millions of dollars in pay, rather than be unemployed and in jail:
According to some of the 30 or so people gathered in a meeting room at the archives, Mr Dimon lambasted Mr Carney– complaining vehemently that the Basel committee’s plan to subject his own and other large institutions to even higher capital requirements than those faced by smaller peers was ill-thought-out and economically and philosophically wrong. He also insisted that some provisions discriminated against US banks .
And:
The ill-tempered exchange in Washington was more than a lone instance. Behind complaints about level playing fields, the entire industry is warming up for a full-on assault on the Basel deal, which was hailed last year as the single most important step towards preventing the next financial Armageddon. The next year or so could determine whether that accord will be left with enough teeth to reshape banking fundamentally – or cease to be worth the paper it is written on.[emphasis added]
This isn't new--I
wrote about one such move back in June and Jamie Dimon's
whining about the new rules.
Here is the nasty, duplicitous irony in all this: Dimon and his ilk are saying that implementing new rules will "kill off" the "recovery" (imaginery, in my view) from the worst financial crisis in recent memory, a crisis Dimon and his ilk created--because there were no rules in place.
Get it?
And the politicians will let them do it.
Unless OccupyWallStreet stops them.