Apparently Senator Levin is not expecting many $250,000 speaking engagements from Wall Street after he leaves the Senate.
The Wall Street Banks have NO business using their subsidized banking funds and deposits to speculate in global markets for their own accounts.
This was the basic safeguard provided by Glass-Steagall for almost sixty years that was overturned in a bipartisan political effort at
gettin' paid.
US Senator Carl Levin Opening Statement, Day Two
"The Federal Reserve is considering arguments that Wall Street banks provide hard-to-replace services in these areas. But the separation between banking and commerce has served markets and our economy quite well for decades. And the erosion of that barrier is clearly doing harm today.
Any discussion of these physical commodities activities must begin and end with the need to protect our economy from risk, our markets from abuse and our consumers from the effects of both.
Wall Street banks with near-zero borrowing costs, thanks to easy access to Fed-provided capital, have used that advantage to elbow their way into commodities markets.
Bad enough that this competitive advantage hurts traditional commercial businesses; worse that it opens the door to price and market manipulation and abusive trading based on nonpublic information."
Read the entire statement here.
Plutarch,
De Superstitiones 171
... but with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums took the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people.
