Fed Looks to Ease Rule that Limits Risky Bank Trading

By MARCY GORDON – WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve is preparing to ease a rule aimed at defusing the kind of risk-taking on Wall Street that played a role in triggering the 2008 financial meltdown.

The Volcker Rule, crafted by regulators 4 1/2 years ago, changed the way the biggest U.S. banks do business. It prohibits them from using the deposits of customers to fund risky trades. It’s a key plank of the landmark Dodd-Frank financial regulation law intended to reduce the likelihood of another crisis and taxpayer-funded bank bailout.

President Donald Trump has blamed Dodd-Frank for constraining economic growth. When the Fed meets Wednesday, it will propose changes to the Volcker Rule.

The Volcker Rule banned high-risk activity known as proprietary trading. The practice had become a huge money-making machine for Wall Street mega-banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. Proprietary trading allowed big banks to tap depositors’ money in federally insured bank accounts — essentially borrowing against that money and using it for investments.

Should California (or Colorado) give its pension money to an absentee slumlord? Or to the world’s largest, “extremely dangerous” shadow bank that charges 14 percent management fees, lost $500 million of CalPERS’ money in 2009, and is up to their neck in oil and private water interests? No? Ellen Brown explains in her latest article in TruthDig the obvious and urgent alternative: a California Public Bank:

Ellen Brown quoted: “Note that these deposits would not be spent. Pension funds, rainy day funds and other pools of government money can provide the liquidity for loans while remaining on deposit in the bank, available for withdrawal on demand by the government depositor. Even mainstream economists now acknowledge that banks do not lend their deposits but actually create deposits when they make loans.”   FULL CALIFORNIA STORY.

We Hold These Truths adds:  Ellen Brown, an attorney, is chairman of the Public Banking Institute, author of “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”  She has taught us that we will soon either have public banks or public bankruptcy!  Ellen Brown has a solution. She has shown us how ANY STATE OR CITY CAN  START A STATE OWNED BANK TO HOLD, AND BENEFIT FROM HOLDING, OUR TAX DOLLARS. 
We cannot trust our States’ politicians because they are under pressure from the outside.  Did you know that in 2013 the Colorado Legislature, like many other states, had quietly passed a law allowing our State tax dollars to be invested in bonds issued by Israel, and that the Governor signed it into law?  These are the bonds issued by a country that now runs on the Shekel, but has flushed two previous currencies down the drain in only 70 years of existence!  And we all have seen Israel deliberately kill as many as 200 of its own young citizens in the prison island, Gaza, and purposely wounded some 2000 more, many with life crippling leg and body wounds.  And its military uses US dollars and US made weapons to do it!  Where does Israel get those dollars?  No matter what State you live in, read We Hold These Truths’ 2013 account of the New Colorado Law, Many States Tout Israeli Junk Bonds.
Do you agree: Israel is not where we want our state’s tax dollars invested?  – Editor CEC