Good morning. Two former Fed chairmen disagree with our current one about TBTF. That and more:
Former Citigroup Chairman: Restore Glass-Steagall (Big Picture)
Our current Fed Chairman: No, don’t restore Glass-Steagall (NPR):
“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” (Alan Greenspan) said recently. Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England, expressed similar sentiments in a speech last week.
But speaking Friday at a conference on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, disagreed.
“We can address these issues in a way that doesn’t destroy the economic value of large, complex multifunction firms through other mechanisms,” he said.
A drop in the wrong bucket (New York Times)
Where’s the outrage over the housing credit scam? (Real Clear Markets) This is what I wrote about last week:
Talk about a double standard. I’m sympathetic to anger on Main Street against banks and investment banks that accepted government money to stay afloat and now are paying big bonuses out of profits. But what the big banks are doing is still legal, if controversial. Compare that to potentially $500 million in homebuyers’ tax credit fraud, according to estimates by the IG. Somehow it seems disproportionate to evoke more outrage about how banks will disperse their earnings than how the IRS may have squandered our money.
AFL-CIO struggles in a new world PBS NewsHour
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