by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Eight long years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, U.S. mega banks on Wall Street still pose a systemic risk to the safety and soundness of banking and the overall financial stability of the United States.
The public no longer has to guess as to whether the above statement is factual or simply the wild imagining of Wall Street activists. No less than the bank-cozy Federal Reserve confirmed on April 13 that three of the largest Wall Street banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) did not have credible plans to unwind themselves without taxpayer assistance if they were to fail, raising the specter of another epic taxpayer bailout adding to the already staggering $19 trillion national debt, much of which resulted from the last bailout. In the case of JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) sent a joint letter with the stunning pronouncement that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.”