Feeling Robbed? Wall Street Since the Bailout Shows No Signs of Changing and Washington is Not Forcing a Change

Not Even a Thank You or an Apology to the Taxpayers

So far the U.S. taxpayer has given Wall Street, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and the big banks $1.2 trillion.  Did anyone hear a thank you? How about an apology for their risky gambling with the world’s economy?

What we have seen has been disconcerting.  Big Finance seems is still living high on the hog, spending freely on parties and bonuses while the world’s poor go deeper into poverty and Americans worry about their jobs, retirement, health care and making ends meet.

The first post-bailout outrage was the massive insurance giant AIG. After receiving an $84 billion tax payer bailout they had a party for their executives – the cost $440,000. There was outrage on Capitol Hill including threats to ‘get the money back.’ “They were getting their manicures, their pedicures, massages, their facials while the American people were paying their bills,” thundered Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD). But, instead the Federal Reserve gave them $38 billion more after their party.

While there were lots of comments from the presidential candidates and congressional leadership about not letting CEO’s profit from the bailout, after the bill was signed into law the Wall Street Journal reported that Neel Kashkari, the bailout czar, told a group of Wall Street executives that the restrictions on executive compensation in the bailout bill really don't mean anything.  As Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote “Of course anyone who bothered to look at the bill already knew that the compensation restrictions were meaningless before the bill passed. So why do we only see this reported in the media after the fact?”

The Guardian of the UK reports that people at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals, in large part discretionary bonuses, totaling more than $70 billion.  Bonuses appear to ignore their failed performance, bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors or plunging the global financial system into a crash with their casino-style investments.  They estimate a tenth of the bailout will be spent on enormous salaries and bonuses. 

And, it seems like the bailout process is being privatized with some of the same people who got us into this mess being hired to get us out of it. Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is hiring as many as 10 asset-management firms to join the lawyers and bankers he is recruiting to implement the government's new $700 billion bank-rescue program.

Rather than bailing out the mortgage markets, Paulsen has been providing cash to big banks -- $125 billion of the first $250 billion.  The EconomicPolicyJournal reports that Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase would each get $25 billion; Bank of America and Wells Fargo, $20 billion each (plus an additional $5 billion for their recent acquisitions); Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, $10 billion each, with Bank of New York Mellon and State Street each receiving $2 to 3 billion. Wells Fargo will get $5 billion for its acquisition of Wachovia, and Bank of America the same amount for its purchase of Merrill Lynch.

What do Americans get in return? The deals Paulsen is making with his former Wall Street colleagues do not ask for much.  Paulsen is evidently no Warren Buffet when it comes to negotiating deals but maybe that is because Paulsen is not using his own money but the taxpayers.  While Buffett received a 10% dividend on his $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs, Paulsen only got 5% for his.  While the UK was able to get a seat at the board table for their injection of cash into banks, Paulsen didn’t. Nor did Paulsen demand any more stringent banking regulations or greater transparency going forward.

The Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair told The Wall Street Journal she was frustrated at the failure of the bailout to provide direct help to struggling homeowners. Mortgage defaults are “what's causing the distress at the institution level,” Bair says, “so why not tackle the borrower problem?”  Maybe Paulsen is not directly focusing on the mortgage problems because bad mortgages are not the problem.  Maybe it is the gigantic derivative bets that have been made? Derivatives are more than an unregulated $500 trillion market – ten times bigger than the world economy. 

But, the banking class has looked to shift the blame.  Perhaps most obnoxious is the effort to blame the poor and working class for the finance crisis.  They point to the Community Reinvestment Act – designed to encourage banks to make efforts to loan to minority applicants, who they had not loaned to in the past. Now, they become the scapegoat for the wealthy bankers – rather than pointing to their own gambling on risky investments and unregulated derivatives.

In fact, the CRA does not require banks to make loans that are unsafe or unprofitable – the law states that CRA lending must be done consistent with safe and sound banking practices. Loans that qualify for CRA credit are often prime loans with fixed rates and consequently, have good performance records. Banks that have made mortgages to low- and moderate-income borrowers to fulfill their CRA obligations have found low default rates and have fewer foreclosures.   In fact, non-CRA lenders made 84.3% of high-cost loans in the 15 largest metropolitan areas. In addition, only a few of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 were institutions with CRA obligations and the vast majority of the top 20 producers of risky interest-only and option ARM loans were not covered by CRA.  In fact, the CRA was passed in 1977 and the rapid growth in subprime lending occurred more than two decades later from 2001-2006 alone.  No major changes to CRA were enacted during this time. 

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