• Sen. Bernie Sanders plans on introducing legislation to break up major banks in the US.
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[QUOTE]Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to introduce new legislation to break up Wall Street banks and prevent them from using the the House-passed spending bill to engage in the kind of investments that led to the 2008 financial crisis. The Independent senator from Vermont used Saturday’s Senate session to outline a proposal that he believes would combat spending bill provisions meant to “gut” financial reforms passed by Congress in 2010. “If Congress cannot regulate Wall Street, there is just one alternative. It is time to break these too-big-to-fail banks up so that they can never again destroy the jobs, homes, and life savings of the American people,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement Saturday.[/QUOTE] [url]http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/13/bernie-sanders-unveils-plan-to-break-up-wall-stree/[/url]
I'll take "bills that will die in committee" for $500, Alex.
Here's an image that illustrates how banks merged into one another up until 2009 (it should go without saying that this isn't my creation): [img]http://i.imgur.com/hTnfTkG.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46707917]Here's an image that illustrates how banks merged into one another up until 2009 (it should go without saying that this isn't my creation): [/QUOTE] Looks a lot like the graph of what happened to those spinoff companies when Bell was broken up. They all just flowed back into AT&T. Most people don't have any clue about the degree of consolidation that has taken place in several sectors of the economy over the last 20 years. You only get to choose between a small handful of banks or ISPs or wireless providers. Your oil and gasoline is entirely controlled by a few large corporations. If you're lucky, you get to choose between buying your groceries at Marsh or Kroger. The natural end state of unregulated capitalism is consolidation and oligopoly. Competing with each other is stupid and counterproductive when you could simply collude and divide up territory.
I think making it illegal to bail out banks when they fail would be more successful, after all; too big to fail is too big. When they crash, they would simply be forced to break up.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46707917]Here's an image that illustrates how banks merged into one another up until 2009 (it should go without saying that this isn't my creation): [img]http://i.imgur.com/hTnfTkG.jpg[/img][/QUOTE] But deregulation makes markets more competitive!* *compeditive: the act of consuming all of your competition
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46707917]Here's an image that illustrates how banks merged into one another up until 2009 (it should go without saying that this isn't my creation): [img]http://i.imgur.com/hTnfTkG.jpg[/img][/QUOTE] Damn, I knew the hole was big, but not [B]this[/B] big
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;46707943]If you're lucky, you get to choose between buying your groceries at Marsh or Kroger.[/QUOTE] There are still a wide variety of grocery stores in different regions. I can think of 5 major grocery stores here (HEB, Walmart, Kmart, Randalls and Target.) Then you have the specialty stores like Central Market and Whole Foods. Then you have the small stores like Dollar General, HEB Pantry, CVS and Walgreens.
[QUOTE=download;46707961]I think making it illegal to bail out banks when they fail would be more successful, after all; too big to fail is too big. When they crash, they would simply be forced to break up.[/QUOTE] How to cause a depression 101 You prevent that situation by making sure they don't get so big that if they go belly up they cause a depression. And you regulate the market so they can't make dumbass investments in ponzy schemes. We had to bail them out in 2007 or it would've been a lot worse. We should've also forced a restructure of the banks then and prosecuted the executives rather than keeping everything in place and having the executives use the bailout money for bonuses.
If they knew they weren't going to get bailed out they would never have taken the financial risk that got them there in the first place. [editline]14th December 2014[/editline] I will concede however that if you do bail them out they should be broken up in the process.
We need to take steps as a nation to prevent this from happening ever again, and implementing legislation to actually make our markets competitive. And not by having large conglomerates merge. We need to break up WalMart, AT&T, ExxonMobil, J.P Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, among others.
the potential effects of such a break-up would actually be rather interesting! if shrinking financial institutions shrinks their share of the GDP, it could reduce one factor leading to inequality and economic malaise: financialization. financialization is essentially the phenomenon where the financial sector sucks up resources and workers, from other more productive sectors of the economy, under the pretense that working and investing in finance will yield a higher return than other sectors. this phenomenon has ultimately pushed down labor's share of income, worsening economic inequality. here's a very interesting article by a former policy advisor for H.W. and reagan, if you want to read it; got lots of good research packed in it: [url]http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/financialization-as-a-cause-of-economic-malaise/[/url]
[QUOTE=thrawn2787;46708047]How to cause a depression 101 You prevent that situation by making sure they don't get so big that if they go belly up they cause a depression. And you regulate the market so they can't make dumbass investments in ponzy schemes. We had to bail them out in 2007 or it would've been a lot worse. We should've also forced a restructure of the banks then and prosecuted the executives rather than keeping everything in place and having the executives use the bailout money for bonuses.[/QUOTE] And then they complain that the federal government forced them to take a buyout at a decreased value when the actual value of their company was a crapton of percentage points below what the government gave them.
[QUOTE=LoganIsAwesome;46708157]We need to break up WalMart[/QUOTE] Trying to break up Walmart is going to be like trying to break up Microsoft - it simply won't happen (and that's probably a good thing for consumers at the end of the day, as there's plenty of regional alternatives in the case of Walmart).
[QUOTE=Smooth Jazz;46707910]I'll take "bills that will die in committee" for $500, Alex.[/QUOTE] I really doubt he expects it to. He's most likely just proposing it to gain positive attention for a possible run at the 2016 election.
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46708188]Trying to break up Walmart is going to be like trying to break up Microsoft - it simply won't happen (and that's probably a good thing for consumers at the end of the day, as there's plenty of regional alternatives in the case of Walmart).[/QUOTE] instead our policy initiative should be removing regulations that were basically lobbied into law in order to sustain near-monopolies
[QUOTE=download;46707961]I think making it illegal to bail out banks when they fail would be more successful, after all; too big to fail is too big. When they crash, they would simply be forced to break up.[/QUOTE] Except the results of that event would be catastrophic to the global economy. By far, the smartest thing to do is break the banks up in the first place. Then you can safely allow them to fail. [editline]13th December 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=thrawn2787;46708047] We had to bail them out in 2007 or it would've been a lot worse. We should've also forced a restructure of the banks then and prosecuted the executives rather than keeping everything in place and having the executives use the bailout money for bonuses.[/QUOTE] It's amazing what kind of treatment campaign contributions will buy you. Somebody needed to go to jail for what happened in 2008. It was the result of systemic risky behavior and, in the case of the mortgage banks, a lot of outright fraud. Personally, I would have been okay with the CEOs of the bailed out banks being shot on the White House lawn. China has the death penalty for some financial crimes...
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;46708242]Personally, I would have been okay with the CEOs of the bailed out banks being shot on the White House lawn. China has the death penalty for some financial crimes...[/quote] Yeah China's penal system sure is something we should try to emulate.
[QUOTE=matt000024;46708195]I really doubt he expects it to. He's most likely just proposing it to gain positive attention for a possible run at the 2016 election.[/QUOTE] I wouldn't be surprised at all if he did this to gain publicity for a soon to be announced run for president.
[QUOTE=Explosions;46708324]Yeah China's penal system sure is something we should try to emulate.[/QUOTE] Whenever a new president is elected, all forms of media produced while the previous president was in office should be destroyed.
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;46708242]Personally, I would have been okay with the CEOs of the bailed out banks being shot on the White House lawn. China has the death penalty for some financial crimes...[/QUOTE] the terrible decisions that these kinds of executives make are nine times out of ten the result of either incompetence, a lack of foresight, or layers of ideological self-assuring delusion.
Warren/Sanders 2016 people. Make it happen.
Snippo
[QUOTE=wickedplayer494;46707917]Here's an image that illustrates how banks merged into one another up until 2009 (it should go without saying that this isn't my creation): [img]http://i.imgur.com/hTnfTkG.jpg[/img][/QUOTE] This graph would be a lot more useful if the line widths indicated the banks' sizes. [editline]edit[/editline] + a proportional area of the graph greyed out for "other" banks. With the current style you could make it say [I]anything[/I] so beyond the individual merger info it's not useful in the slightest.
Nationalize banks that fail.
If all of this financial deregulation doesn't get clawed back, the system'll collapse under its own hubris and take the global economy down with it (again).
[QUOTE=GunFox;46708585]Nationalize banks that fail.[/QUOTE] Because those banks would obviously be better off directly in the hands of the people who created the circumstances where they became too big to fail, and subsequently failed.
Regulation and reduction on monopoly corporation is the way forward, they should be forced to divide up into the many entities they once were back in 1990s or prior. As said above, nationalize the banks that fail.
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