BREAKING NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
In a block-buster, massive headline interview at 7 AM, July 25, 2012 on CNBC “Squawk Box,” Sandy says “Times have changed. . . I want America to lead. . . I care about America.”
Today’s 7 AM interview with Sandy Weill is the most important even since the 2008 crash of the world financial system that Weill sowed. Here is the legendary, most powerful man in Manhattan, a former Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, suddenly advising the world to overturn the financial model that he personally created!
After singlehandedly overturning the Depression Era law, Glass–Steagall Act, that separated deposit taking commercial banks from insurance from investment banking and securities, suddenly Sandy, at age 78, wants to break up the crown jewel of his professional career.
I had blamed Weill’s creation of Citibank as the seed that, in cooperation with the creation of Fannie Mae and the Obama/ACORN drive for mortgages to people who could not qualify for a $300 credit card, started the corruption and destruction of the world financial system that bore the deadly fruit of the 2008 worldwide financial crash.
Not only was I a corporate finance officer in a “major bracket” investment bank, I was my firm’s expert on financing and providing capital to commercial banks, and performed the last public equity financing of Barnett Banks of Florida. I had strenuously opposed the securitization of mortgages and other bank loans into securities that could be publicly traded.
At that time Sandy appeared to be ignoring the law and expanded his base of securities trading investment banks into commercial banking and into insurance. Sandy acquired a number of securities firms, which then acquired Citibank, Traveler’s Insurance, and the A.L. Williams multi-level marketing insurance and mutual fund organization.
It was Weill’s getting Glass Steagall overturned the made the hydra-headed “universal banks” like Citigroup into unmanageable monsters, and made Weill fabulously rich and powerful, while simultaneously creating a worldwide financial system that has proven to be catastrophic, and which still has not been fixed and made healthy.
What is it about old age that makes robber-barons suddenly see the error of their ways?
Sandy’s protégé Jamie Dimon is the legendary head of JP Morgan Chase. Dimon left Sandy when Sandy promoted his daughter in preference to Dimon. Under Dimon’s leadership, which was learned under and copied from Weill, JP Morgan has become the leading US “universal bank.” What impacts will Sandy’s advising that the US breakup the “universal banks” have on JP Morgan?
Weill now says that deposit taking institutions should be separate from investment banks, and thatbank and securities firms’ leverage should be 12 – 15 to one. Lehman, counting off balance sheet liabilities, was more than 50:1. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008 were leveraged more than 50:1, which was wiped out in minutes.
Investment banks should not have the ability to be bailed out by central banks.