Lie Against Glass-Steagall Is Destroyed

Anticipating Glass-Steagall restoration to be introduced into the 114th Congress, financial columnist Pam Martens wrote an excellent, Jan. 12 column destroying the primary lie deployed against Glass-Steagall during the past three years. And, Martens revealed that when she first exposed this lie in 2012 in letters to the New York Times, which had published the lie in a column by its financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times refused to retract, or to print a word from her.

Sorkin first circulated the sophistry that “since Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and AIG were not commercial banks, Glass-Steagall was irrelevant to how the 2007-08 crash could have been avoided.” That lie became Tim Geithner’s line in browbeating Congress against restoring Glass-Steagall; Obama’s line; and the line of the neocon American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison, which was used to confuse Republicans. Now it is repeated in a new book by a radical Keynesian economist which is being given great play and is momentarily No. 1 on the non-fiction best-seller list — Hall of Mirrors, by UC Berkeley economics professor Barry Eichengreen.

Martens’s facts, which the Times refused to print and “experts” like Professor Eichengreen prefer to overlook, are worth presenting in detail:

“Lehman Brothers owned two FDIC insured banks, Lehman Brothers Bank FSB and Lehman Brothers Commercial Bank. Together, they held $17.2 billion in assets as of June 30, 2008, 75 days before Lehman went belly up. Lehman Brothers Bank FSB is where Lehman handled its mortgage loan originations. When the FDIC approved the Lehman Brothers Commercial Bank application in 2005, it specifically noted that the FDIC insured bank ‘anticipates acting as a derivatives intermediary’…”

“Merrill Lynch also owned three FDIC insured banks. At an FDIC symposium held at the National Press Club in 2003, Merrill Senior VP, John Qua, explained the banking side of Merrill as follows: ‘Merrill Lynch conducts banking in the United States through two depository institutions — Merrill Lynch Bank USA, a Utah industrial loan corporation; and Merrill Lynch Bank and Trust, a New Jersey state non-member bank. We also own a federal savings bank that offers personal trust services to our clients’….”

“Bear Stearns owned Bear Stearns Bank Ireland, which is now part of JPMorgan and called JPMorgan Bank (Dublin) PLC. According to JPMorgan,… “It has also been added to the JPMorgan Jumbo issuance programs to issue structured securities for distribution outside the United States.”

“AIG owned, in 2008 at the time of the crisis, the FDIC insured AIG Federal Savings Bank. On June 30, 2008, it held $1 billion in assets. AIG also owned 71 U.S.-based insurance entities and 176 other financial services companies throughout the world, including AIG Financial Products which blew up the whole company selling credit default derivatives.” [AIG’s cross-ownerships would have been barred by both Glass-Steagall and the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act, which was also gutted by the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall.-ed.]

“AIG’s annuities … represent a significant source of income to retirees. Had AIG been allowed to fail, state guaranty funds for insurance products could have been wiped out….”

As to our situation today, Martens notes: “According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency which oversees national banks, as of December 31, 2011, inside the insured banks — not their broker-dealer components — were the following derivative holdings: $70.1 trillion at JPMorgan Chase; $52.1 trillion at Citibank; $50.1 trillion at Bank of America; $44.2 trillion at Goldman Sachs Bank USA.”