‘Too big’ banks got bigger

Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
Tue Sep 07, 2010

In September 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson convinced the Bush administration and Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy up bad loans, or the banking system would collapse.

Once Paulson obtained the TARP money, however, he abandoned his original plan and instead began handing money out to a few large Wall Street firms, including the insurance company AIG, which eventually got $182 billion in government handouts.

AIG in turn used the money to pay its debts to counterparties, including $13 billion it owed Goldman Sachs. Treasury’s point man on the AIG bailout was a former Goldman executive, Dan H. Jester who, the New York Times reported, still owned Goldman stock while managing the bailout. No surprise then that he insisted that AIG pay Goldman (and others) one hundred cents on the dollar.

Paulson, who had received $600 million as Goldman’s CEO, also rejected suggestions that big banks take a “haircut,” which could have saved taxpayers billions (and cost Goldman billions).

The “coincidences” continue. Current Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein was in the room when Paulson and Geithner set the bailout terms for AIG. There was a Goldman connection in the Citigroup payout, too. Its Washington frontman was ex-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a former Goldman vice-chair and board member, who received $126 million from Citigroup. The bank got $25 billion, and a few weeks later, $20 billion more — which Paulson justified because of Citigroup’s “declining stock price.”

These firms benefited from the corrupt system of crony capitalism that rotates high financial officials between Washington and Wall Street, making both Treasury and the Fed captives of the financial industry. The Fed and Treasury even paid JPMorgan’s lawyer, Marshall Huebner, to advise on the bailout, despite the fact that JPMorgan got TARP money.

The regulators (and legislators) who are supposed to be watch dogs are frequently lap dogs instead, maneuvering for Wall Street jobs themselves. In addition, our electoral system allows special interests to spread millions around Capitol Hill in the form of “campaign contributions,” or, if such legalized bribery doesn’t work, to bankroll opposition candidates.

The five-member Congressional Oversight Panel under Elizabeth Warren concluded that the Fed’s strategic decisions on AIG were influenced by the very banks that benefited most from the bailout. The Fed, on paper a hybrid organization melding public and private interests, consistently sided with bankers and against taxpayers. Moreover, neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations extracted a single major concession from Wall Street in exchange for the handouts. Obama had a chance to break up the big banks, as Paul Volcker advised, but he reportedly listened to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers instead.

But it was Bush’s TARP bailout that rescued bankrupt firms from their bad bets on housing prices, and established the principal that capitalism is for small banks; big banks get government guarantees. Yet Wall Street executives received more in bonuses in 2009 than in 2007.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation, has said that nearly 80 percent of the bonuses that failing bank managers paid themselves were unmerited. A bankrupt Merrill Lynch paid out billions in bonuses just before BofA took them over, and their CEO, John Thain, requested a $40 million golden parachute from his board. Lehman CEO Dick Fuld destroyed his firm but was reportedly rewarded with nearly $500 million by Lehman between 2000 and 2008. Andrew Hall, a Citigroup trader, got a $100 million payout in 2008 even though his company was insolvent. Morgan Stanley’s “star” bond trader, Howie Hubler, reportedly lost $9 billion dollars and still got a reputed $50 million golden parachute.

Wall Street got a free lunch; the taxpayers got the bill.

The new financial reform bill will force banks to modify some risky practices, such as proprietary trading, although much depends on how the implementing regulations are written. But the bill reportedly does not restrict the hedge funds and “special purpose vehicles” banks use to circumvent financial regulations, prohibit the off-balance-sheet accounting intended to conceal liabilities, nor stop Goldman’s practice of selling collateralized debt obligations specially designed to fail and then using the stacked deck to bet against their customers. In addition, it does not require changes to the compensation structure that encourages excessive risk.

Finally, it does not address the major problem. As a result of failures and mergers among the Big Nine Wall Street firms, we now have five super banks, bigger and more powerful than ever. And more than ever, too big to fail.

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