The testimonies given are all excellent summaries of the unjustifiable risks and costs we are paying for the refusal to break up ‘too big to fail’ banks and re-establish a clear division between traditional banking and their speculative pursuits–profit-levering, trading and churning through capital markets. We have already learned these lessons the hard way several times in history. Today we seem destined to feel that pain some more before changes will finally be made. We have let banks have their unfettered way with us, and the real economy (the 99.9% of us) continue to suffer the consequences. Not surprisingly the bank representatives all respectively disagree.
Joshua Rosner, managing director at Graham Fisher & Co., Tim Weiner, global risk manager of commodities and metals at MillerCoors LLC, Saule Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Randall Guynn, head of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP’s financial institutions group, testify at a Senate subcommittee hearing on U.S. banks, financial rules and commodity trading. The panel is led by U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, who is among lawmakers and regulators who say banks can drive up prices when they control both the physical products and the financing.Here is a direct video link of the hearing.
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