FedUpUSA

You have to love Dear Old Bill:

April 18 (Bloomberg) — Former President Bill Clinton said he should have pushed for regulation of financial derivatives when he was president, rejecting the advice of top economic advisers Robert (I am Citibank) Rubin and Larry (I nearly bankrupted Harvard) Summers.

The argument was that derivatives didn’t need transparency because they were “expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of people would buy them,” Clinton said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “The flaw in this argument was that first of all, sometimes people with a lot of money make stupid decisions and make it without transparency.”

Clinton also said that Republicans who controlled Congress would have stopped him from trying to regulate derivatives. “I wish I had been caught trying,” Clinton said. “I mean, that was a mistake I made.”

Uh huh.

Mr. Bill.  You do remember this little law PL 106-102, 113 Stat 1338, right?

Do you remember it’s title and the date it was enacted?

Yes, you did sign it Mr. Clinton on November 12th, 1999, and in doing so you retroactively made legal an unlawful merger of two companies that your fabulous former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, intentionally allowed to occur (and granted a waiver for which he had no lawful authority to give), remember?

The law in question is otherwise known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

Without it the disastrous derivatives mess could not have happened, because regulated banks with access to The Fed window, not to mention FDIC depositor protection, could not have engaged in derivative trades.

Let us also remember that your Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin (who you claim gave you “wrong” advice) resigned as Treasury Secretary and brokered the deal to pass GLBA.  While doing so he was allegedly in secret negotiations to become the head of Citigroup, the direct and proximate beneficiary of making their merger retroactively legal.

IF you want to try to repair your legacy on this account what you need to do is press for the repeal of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, making it your singular political focus until it is both achieved and every institution that operates in this nation in violation of Glass-Steagall (which would be effectively re-imposed) is broken up.

GLBA was nothing more or less than a license to loot this nation and Mr. Rubin was personally and deeply involved in its passage for both his own and Citi’s corporate benefit.  It was and is a shining monument to the colossal corruption and outrageous kleptocracy that became the mantra of The United States under your Presidency and has continued since to this day.

You are 100% responsible for this mess Mr. Clinton, and I, along with many others, have absolutely zero intention of ever letting anyone forget that.

A little visual aid here:

Without Bill’s signature on Gramm-Leach-Bliley, investment bankers never would ahve had access to piles of federally-insured deposits.  Without access to this pile of money, the investment bankers couldn’t have purchased derivatives.  Derivatives are where the CDO’s and CDS’s live and these are the vehicles that banks used to offload their worthless garbage (risky mortgages) onto the greater investment community.

The housing bubble was impossible to blow without Clinton’s signature on GLBA.    That nice little parabolic move there that started in 1999 would have been impossible without the investment banks having access to depositor funds and FDIC backstops for their derivatives book.  Without the GLBA that repealed the heart of Glass-Steagall, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan/Chase, was quoted as saying:

“When profits fall too sharply then capital will move somewhere else, where there is more money to be earned, for example non-regulated markets,” Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said in the German mass circulation Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag.

“The question is, is that what regulators want?,” said Dimon who heads the second-largest U.S. bank.

In the German interview, he also said the banking industry could do with more influence on politicians.

I have an excellent solution to Mr. Dimon’s request.

See, JP Morgan apparently was involved in a sordid little scheme in Jefferson County, Alabama, in which a number of politicians (and their friends) decided to hand some bribes around.

The outcome of that little scheme was that a sewer system replacement wound up costing the citizens of the county twenty five times what it should have, and much of that (improper at best and illicit in all probability) extra cost went to JP Morgan.

Oh, and in addition to the outcome of this job costing the fine citizens of Jefferson County far more than it should have (that county, by the way, includes the city of Birmingham) a number of politicians and others went to prison – either as a result of a plea of “guilty” or after a trial by a “jury of one’s peers”.

It is thus entirely fair (and not libelous) to say not that there was “alleged” bribery involved but that actual bribery took place.  That is, this has now been proved in a court of law, at least with regards to those who have been convicted.

To date, however, nobody from JP Morgan has been indicted or charged in connection with this sordid little mess.

It therefore seems appropriate that the best resolution to Mr. Dimon’s request would be for him to be criminally charged as the head of JP Morgan/Chase in connection with the Jefferson County case and, upon conviction, he can be placed as a cellmate with the fine politicians from Jefferson County who are already serving a sentence, thereby gaining as much “influence” on those politicians as he is willing and able to absorb!

Of course Mr. Dimon, like all Americans, is entitled to the presumption of innocence, a jury of one’s peers, and a speedy public trial.  I suggest that the jury should be comprised of citizens of Jefferson County, since they were inherently part of this sordid mess of a transaction and thus are most-certain Mr. Dimon’s “peers” for the purposes of any alleged offense.