Jewish mega-banker gets religion

Jewish banker Sanford Weill is one of the biggest (and most corrupt) names on Wall Street. Recently on CNBC he “got religion,” saying we should break up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks and re-install Glass-Steagall, so that speculators cannot play with regular depositors’ money, and banks cannot over-leverage themselves. Weill said regular banks should return to the regular business of making personal, commercial, and real estate loans. He said assets should not be priced fraudulently, but should instead be marked-to-market.

The web link for the video is below. 

Let’s recall who Weill is, and then surmise why he suddenly “got religion.”

Weill was head of Citigroup when the company defrauded investors of the collapsed WorldCom (and later agreed to pay $2.65 billion to settle a class-action suit). Soon thereafter, when Weill was still chairman of Citigroup, the company defrauded its own employees, stealing millions. You can read about this at wikipedia.

If any single person is responsible for Wall Street banks becoming Too-Big-To-Fail, it is Weill. In 1998 he created Citigroup by combining Traveler’s Insurance and Citibank. Then he bribed the Clinton administration and Congressman Phil Gramm to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act. Weill also hired Robert Rubin, then Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury, to oversee his new Citigroup empire. The New York Times says Weill even has a plaque in his office that boasts “The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall.”

Weill created the business model that Wall Street uses to this day — unleashing traders to make big, risky bets with other peoples’ money that deliver huge bonuses when they turn out well, and cost taxpayers dearly when they don’t. Naturally Weill made a fortune from his crimes.

Every other bank followed suit. JPMorgan and Bank of America followed Weill’s example with their own mega-deals, and their bonus pools exploded as well. Citi was king of them all for a while, the biggest bank in the world, and Weill departed in 2006, his evil handiwork complete. And then the wheels started to come off. About a year and a half after Weill's departure as chairman, Citi announced horrific losses from its exposure to subprime mortgages. A year after that, the government pumped $45 billion into the bank to prop it up.
 
Since then, Citigroup and the other Too-Big-To-Fail banks have been bailed out several more times, so that they may continue their crimes. (After receiving his second bailout, Sandy Weill chartered a jetliner, loaded it up with friends and relatives, and took them on a fabulous vacation to Mexico.) JPMorgan, headed by one of Weill’s protégés, Jamie Dimon, recently lost $5.8 billion on some risky bets. This means that another $5.8 billion in losses will be dumped on taxpayers.  

Meanwhile the TBTF banks continue to grow even bigger, since the larger their losses, the bigger their bailouts. In 2006 the five biggest banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) had assets amounting to 43  percent of U.S. GDP. Now it’s 56 percent, according to Bloomberg. 

WHY WEILL GOT RELIGION

It was not out of a moral conscience. Weill is concerned that the Too-Big-To-Fail banks are on thin ice that gets thinner all the time. TBTF banks are making a fortune from their frauds and financial swindles, which is wonderful, but the TBTF banks are also insolvent.

We know this because their stock is close to worthless. On April 6, 1998, the day Weill merged Citi and Travelers together to form the present monstrosity, Citigroup stock traded at $252 per share. Now it is $10 per share.

All TBTF banks have stock-price valuations lower than their "book value," or net worth. This means investors think that if TBTF banks held a giant yard sale and unloaded everything they own, then the TBTF banks would collect far less than the value of their stock. In other words, the banks are powerful, but shit. Most of what they own is worthless, and the game only keeps going because of endless bailouts. The corporate media says the TBTF banks are fine, but investors are not deceived.

Weill understands all this, and says we must break up the TBTF banks before they collapse.

Not that he cares about the USA. This is a filthy rich, 79-year-old Brooklyn Jew living in a Greenwich Connecticut mansion. He is sad to think that TBTF banks move closer to collapse every day, which would mean the end of the fun.  

See the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ_fvnN9P2Q