Thursday, May 02, 2013

Killing The Bank Subsidy

The Growing Sentiment on the Hill For Ending 'Too Big To Fail' | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone:
...Fast forward a few weeks. The Senate is in full budget-debate fury, with members pulling all-nighters and people on the Hill generally losing their minds. In the middle of all of this, Republican Senator David Vitter and Democrat Sherrod Brown – the same Senators who have been planning legislation to cap the size of banks, a revived version of the failed Brown-Kaufman amendment from the Dodd-Frank bill – offered a non-binding amendment to the budget that would direct the government to end the subsidies and advantages banks derive from the perception that they are Too Big to Fail.

The key word in this story is "non-binding," but here's the cool thing: the amendment passed unanimously. By a vote of 99-0, the entire Senate agreed, at least in principle, that the banks should not be getting that extra $83 billion a year...

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