Bank CEOs to answer for financial crisis
Washington (CNNMoney.com) - As lawmakers start trickling back to Washington next week, a panel tasked with investigating the financial crisis is set to make its first big splash.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a 10-member panel appointed last summer by Congress, will hold public hearings on Wednesday and Thursday.
First up are four chiefs of some of the best-known and largest banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America.
The panel's chairman, Philip Angelides, said he's interested in hearing about the banks' role in creating the crisis as well as finding out how they became "too big to fail." The federal government stepped in to prop up the banks in fall 2008, creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program to help provide them with liquidity.
Will this panel ask any questions of that old rascal Barney Frank,his running buddy Chris Dodd, ole cheating Tim Geithner or any of the real culprits?
Perhaps a bigger question for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is what happened to the financial regulations that were enacted during the last depression?
Why were banks and other institutions allowed to swindle my life savings?
Since there were a lot of people that generated a great sum of wealth for themselves during the past few decades, when will we tax them and give us middle class a tax break?
I'm going to fight the "too big to fail" banks by removing my money and depositing it into the small, safe community banks.
But whose going to investigate the Democrats and their actions concerning Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac??? Whose going to investiagte all the Democrats and all the campaign contributions they got from these people as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
The Democrats played a MAJOR role when they pushed for low income people getting mortgages for houses they couldn't afford, ie. sub-prime mortgages.
As usual, the politicans will pretend they weren't part of the problem but the people know better.
That's rich. The headlines in yesterday's home town paper was about the unprecedented surge in individual bankruptcies in the Bay Area counties. Congress- the cause of this mess and now a day late and much more than a dollar short.
about time eh?
Philip Angelides as chaiman is like the fox guarding the chickencoop.
How about the Congress look at the Government mandated lending practices of Fannie and Freddie that helped caused the collapse? Oh yeah, thats right, we won't do that because that would show another failed liberal experiment that harmed the country.
Any chance that any of those guys will go to jail? Or are they too big to arrest them too?
Greedy bankers are what caused this. Some people love to say that lending to people who could not afford it caused this, but if these lenders had lended honestly and put some common sense rules in place, there would have been a problem. Everyone deserves a chance to own their own home, but bankers only saw income, not people. But the bankers did pretty well for themselves. People have lost their homes, but the big banker boys are still collecting those big salaries, no problem.
That's the transparency I want!
So what? They'll take the 5th, just like CEOs did for the past decade! And of course republicans will cheer them on, trying somehow to twist it as if the economic recession was somehow Obama's fault, even though Bush was the president for those eight years!
Banks are in the business of making money by handling it.
Individual customers have to be in the business of watching out for their own money.
Did you buy a house for a million dollars, knowing that it couldn't be worth more than about one-half of that, but hoping to make a killing by paying off a loan?
If bank customers run around with buckets of soapy water and bubble wands filling the neighborhood with things that are doomed to burst, the guys selling the soapy water and wands are not completely to blame.
We don't produce many things of value in this country.
Signing a government welfare check is of no value; it produces nothing.
Welding a seam in a car at unrealistic union prices produces nothing of greater value than the seam an industrious worker in another country is willing to produce at a much lower price.
Trying to make killings in Wall Street gambles is another version of the something-for-nothing Impossible Dream.
Don't blame bank CEOs for realizing this, working the system, and enjoying their martinis at destination restaurants.
There still isn't any free lunch.