by Pam Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Two interesting things happened this week just one day apart. On Monday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of national banks, released its quarterly report on “Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities” which documented insane levels of risk at four federally-insured banks, which have merged themselves with Wall Street’s trading casinos to form Frankenbanks. The very next day, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg News, Jared Dillian, wrote a column lamenting the “loss of risk-taking” on Wall Street which he appears to blame on “excessive compliance and regulation.” The column was given the pity-party title: “The Wall Street That I Once Knew No Longer Exists.”
Compare these two very disparate views of the reality on Wall Street today. The OCC’s report shares this:
“The total notional amount of derivative contracts held by banks in the third quarter increased by $978.0 billion (0.5 percent) to $184.5 trillion from the previous quarter…The four banks with the most derivative activity hold 89.3 percent of all bank derivatives….”