A Tale Of Two Countries
Floor Speech
Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, Fortune magazine reported on October 20, 2009, a title story, ``Big Banks, Take Your Money and Run.''
The New York Times today reported, ``As Wall Street has returned to business as usual, industry power has become even more concentrated among relatively few firms.''
A handful of mammoth banks has brought our Nation, our credit system and our economy to its knees. Some call them ``too big to fail.'' One must ask:
Why should a few big players have so much power that they can force taxpayer bailouts for themselves, can shut off credit and can hold the reins of our economy in their hands?
A handful of firms are gobbling up our money and are killing off smaller banking institutions. Congress and this administration are just letting them do it. My friends, such concentration of financial power is dangerous to our country.
A few Wall Street firms are on the fast track to controlling all banking in this country. Rather than address this by breaking up these banks, some in Washington say they just want to regulate them better. If you believe that, you haven't paid any attention over this last year.
The biggest banks are getting bigger. In fact, a year ago, the biggest ones controlled 30 percent of the deposits in the country, according to Fortune magazine. Now they're up to 37 percent, and they're growing even faster. Here are their names: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and PNC. PNC practically has price control power over western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio right now.
These firms have already shown us that regulations mean nothing to them. They invent loopholes before Washington has even thought of them. Why wouldn't they again? Not all of their activities were by the book either. Fraud is rampant. Yet we cannot even get a grip on fraud because there are not enough FBI agents to look into mortgage, corporate and securities fraud. We need 1,000 FBI agents, not a few hundred, to untangle what has really been going on.
Americans have a right to be angry about being cheated out of their money, their homes and their jobs; but how long will Congress and the administration tiptoe around the power grab? Wall Street goes right on, seizing all they can get their hands on, and they are holding onto the money so tightly they're not lending it. They're buying up one another and the smaller banks, rewarding themselves quite handsomely.
There is a clear solution: Break them up. It's overdue. The Governor of the Bank of England says to break them up. Why not? Why are we protecting Wall Street's bad boys?
Another terrible precedent: rewarding more hazard rather than preventing it. We've been there before, and look where it got us now. This brings to mind Charles Dickens' 19th-century English masterpiece, ``A Tale of Two Cities,'' except this is the United States, and it is the 21st century, and it is a tale not of two cities but of two countries.
There is one country where the giant banks are making so much money that they are setting aside enough to pay each worker in their investment banking division a bonus of $353,834. That country is Wall Street. The other country, where I come from--Toledo, Ohio and places like it--is where the median household annual income is not even one-tenth of what they get as bonuses. Our median income is $35,216. That's not even one-tenth as much as JPMorgan Chase is setting aside just for bonuses for its investment banking employees.
In one country, banks make themselves too big to fail. They privatize their profits and they socialize the losses. In the other country, which I represent, families, which are too small to matter, lose their jobs to globalization and their homes to foreclosure.
In the other country, where I live, the unemployment rate exceeds 13 percent. Housing values have fallen more than 10 percent in a single year, and foreclosures are up 94 percent. The mortgage workouts Congress promised with all of those bills that were rushed through here are just an illusion. They're not happening.
There is something really wrong with this picture. There is something really wrong with our economy.
Even one of the Wall Street analysts picked up on it. He was quoted by the AP as saying, ``Wall Street is picking up quite smartly while Main Street continues to suffer.'' Do you mean someone up there has finally noticed?
Madam Speaker, there is a solution here: Break them up. It's long overdue.
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