Donâ€™t Break Up the Banks. Theyâ€™re Not Our Real Problem.

In the movie "The Big Short," Steve Carell plays a slightly altered version of me. In real life, I am a portfolio manager and financial services analyst who over a 25-year career has, at times, been highly critical of bank behavior.

More than eight years after the financial crisis, many people say that the large banks still pose a threat to the economy and should be broken up. Such a view captures the justifiable anger many Americans still feel toward the large banks. But I don't agree. Breaking up the banks would ignore the significant progress made by regulators to reduce the risks posed by these institutions, and it wouldn't address what I believe is the central problem with the economy today.

One of the most important aspects of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010 was the division of labor. Today, the Federal Reserve regulates safety and soundness and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau looks after consumers dealing with all financial institutions. This is a significant improvement.

Under the new regulatory regime, the leverage of the large banks has been reduced. While Citigroup's leverage peaked at 33 to one, today it stands at less than 10 to one.

Now that we have a new bank regulatory regime that seems to be working, we should not complicate it with breakup proposals whose ultimate implications are unclear at best. But it is absolutely crucial that the new regulations not be rolled back. The Federal Reserve should continue its annual stress tests of the large banks. Calls for restricting the power of the consumer protection board should be rejected outright.

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on â€œnational securityâ€ grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bankâ€™s stockholders reside in Europe.

One important repository for the wealth of the global oligarchy that owns these bank holding companies is US Trust Corporation â€“ founded in 1853 and now owned by Bank of America. A recent US Trust Corporate Director and Honorary Trustee was Walter Rothschild. Other directors included Daniel Davison of JP Morgan Chase, Richard Tucker of Exxon Mobil, Daniel Roberts of Citigroup and Marshall Schwartz of Morgan Stanley. [2]

J. W. McCallister, an oil industry insider with House of Saud connections, wrote in The Grim Reaper that information he acquired from Saudi bankers cited 80% ownership of the New York Federal Reserve Bank- by far the most powerful Fed branch- by just eight families, four of which reside in the US. They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.

CPA Thomas D. Schauf corroborates McCallisterâ€™s claims, adding that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York. Schauf lists William Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff and James Stillman as individuals who own large shares of the Fed. [3] The Schiffs are insiders at Kuhn Loeb. The Stillmans are Citigroup insiders, who married into the Rockefeller clan at the turn of the century.

Eustace Mullins came to the same conclusions in his book The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, in which he displays charts connecting the Fed and its member banks to the families of Rothschild, Warburg, Rockefeller and the others. [4]

The control that these banking families exert over the global economy cannot be overstated and is quite intentionally shrouded in secrecy. Their corporate media arm is quick to discredit any information exposing this private central banking cartel as â€œconspiracy theoryâ€. Yet the facts remain.

The problem is not with banks. The problem is people who borrow from their past by mortgaging their future to spend in the present, especially on depreciating goods, consumables, and non-tradable services, in which the value cannot ever be recaptured.

What has made this Kool-aid economy possible is having reducing the banks' required reserves on deposit against the amount that they have loaned.

In my youth and early married years, there was no thing such as a "credit card." If you did not have cash, or money from a secured loan, you had to make do with what you had. Retirement was financed by the earnings from savings and investments.

It is time to break up banks to their original status: no business past the state line in which the bank was chartered. No sub-prime ~~loans~~ losses.

IMHO

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