What could be more symbolic? Bank of America is trying to shift its most dangerous assets (debts) onto its FDIC accounts - i.e have you and me the taxpayers insure their risk and if they fail (likely) bail them out again.
All while the Occupy Wall Street movement and its support grows, even changing the national conversation.
(oh, there's more)
First let's start with all our friends at Bank of America. Probably one of the biggest offenders in fraudclosure and potentially insolvent as soon as the cases reach court, but like any good form of cancer Bank of America wants to spread as far throughout our organs as possible, from Bloomberg News:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting...
Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC- insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.
So yes, of course, the Federal Reserve is backing the Banksters because they literally are the Banksters - owned by and members of. Another transfer and potentially multi-billion dollar bailout on the taxpayers.
It might be instructive to see the exit interview from the last chairperson of the FDIC, one of the few adults during the 2008 crisis, Sheila Bair, from New York Times Magazine:
“They always had the view that the F.D.I.C. was not in the same league as Treasury and the Fed,” she told me. “As a result, we were rarely consulted. They would bring me in after they’d made their decision on what needed to be done, and without giving me any information they would say, ‘You have to do this or the system will go down.’ If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times. ‘Citi is systemic, you have to do this.’ No analysis, no meaningful discussion. It was very frustrating.”
Too often, she felt, their requests were excessive, putting taxpayers at risk while bailing out undeserving debt holders. For instance, during the peak of the crisis, with credit markets largely frozen, banks found themselves unable to roll over their short-term debt. This made it virtually impossible for them to function. Geithner wanted the F.D.I.C. to guarantee literally all debt issued by the big bank-holding companies — an eye-popping request.
Bair said no. Besides the risk it would have entailed, it would have also meant a windfall for bondholders, because much of the existing debt was trading at a steep discount....
“Why did we do the bailouts?” she went on. “It was all about the bondholders,” she said. “They did not want to impose losses on bondholders, and we did. We kept saying: ‘There is no insurance premium on bondholders,’ you know? For the little guy on Main Street who has bank deposits, we charge the banks a premium for that, and it gets passed on to the customer. We don’t have the same thing for bondholders. They’re supposed to take losses.”
Make no mistake Treasury and the Fed are working for the Top 1% i.e "the bondholders" in most of those situations. The 1% are the bondholders and rather than face "market discipline" as they ask poor and working people to face they want bailouts.
The current American economic system: Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor.
But on to some happy news. While BofA is lobbying its very good friends in the government for another bailout, Occupy Wall Street is already having an impact in the national conversation.
According to a Pew Media Analysis:
The U.S. economy topped the news last week, powered in large part by increasing attention to the Occupy Wall Street protests...
There were other elements to economic coverage last week, including the defeat of President Obama’s jobs bill in the U.S. Senate. And the subject of unemployment and jobs accounted for about one-quarter of the week’s economic news.
But the Occupy Wall Street protests were the prominent economic theme.
Not just changing the conversation to economics but some of the important agenda items of the protests, Pew continued:
[O]n its nightly newscast, NBC anchor Brian Williams declared that the “center of the [protest] message is increasingly resonating,” a statement followed by news of a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicating that 37% of Americans now support the protests, including 40% of those making $75,000 or more a year.
But I guess the critics are right about having an unclear message.
If only, as so many continually cry the protesters had some clear point. If only Occupy Wall Street would let us know if it was challenging a particular group of people represented by a particular location... like Wall Street or something.
Oh well I guess we'll have to continue to wonder what these protests - that are bending the national conversation towards economic justice - are about.
(Sign from Occupy Wall Street Protests)