Is there any organized effort to boycott Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America?

[seemslikeadream]

If not why not?

[corkhead]

1. Yes, it's called "Your Local Credit Union"

[BlooInBloo]

3. BECU for the win!

\o/

[seemslikeadream]

5. guess what?

That's where I bank

[BlooInBloo]

2. And any bank that does business with them?

[seemslikeadream]

6. Well yea

I think they should fail

[BlooInBloo]

7. Heh.

[FARAFIELD]

4. Quite possibly the lamest thread of the night

Unless there is an explination about why they hell we should "boycott" Why not Wells while we are at it! CIti, wells, and BofA are the only three banks left in the whole country. JPMChase just filed to become a holding company.

[seemslikeadream]

8. Here's a couple of reasons

CEOs: (From left) Robert Willumstad (July 2008-September 2008), Martin Sullivan (2005-2008), Maurice (Hank) Greenberg (1968-2005)

Company: American International Group (AIG). world's largest insurance firm

On their watch: In Willumstad's brief tenure, AIG stock plunged from around $27 a share
to $2 a share, and the ailing firm agreed to an $85 billion government bailout. Sullivan left
after two quarters of record losses and $20 billion in sub prime-mortgage-related losses.
Greenberg was credited with shaping AIG into the world's largest insurer but was forced
out in 2005 due to a fraud investigation. No charges were filed against him.

Payout: $7 million for Willumstad's three months of work, $47 million for Sullivan and for Greenberg, despite the investigation, a 12 percent stake in AIG. That stake, however, isn't worth what it was once was. After the government bailout, Greenberg's $3billion interest nearly disappeared, and he dropped off the Forbes list of the richest people in the world





CEO: Ken Thompson

Company: Wachovia

On his watch: Shareholders called for his ouster at their annual meeting in April 2008 following a first-quarter loss and a dividend cut of 41 percent. Thompson had earlier promised the dividend would not be cut. He also came under fire for his $25 billion purchase of home lender Golden West, a deal he made at the height of the housing boom. He is shown here (at left) arriving at the April meeting. He resigned the next month.

Payout: $8.7 million

CEO: Michael Perry

Company: IndyMac Bank

On his watch: The bank collapsed in July 2008, in what regulators called the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. Despite mouting losses from delinquent loans in 2007, Perry insisted in December that the bank would be profitable by the second half of 2008. A protege of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, Perry was 45 when he was removed from his 15-year tenure as CEO during the FDIC's takeover.

Payout: Unknown. Forbes, however, listed Perry's five-year compensation total from IndyMac as $37.49 million.

CEOS Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron

Company: Fannie Mae (Mudd) and Freddie Mac (Syron)

On there watch: Earlier this year, Mudd predicted Fannie would "feast" on the reduced competition in the mortgage insurer suffered four consecutive quarters in the red amid the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. Likewise, Syron reportedly rejected internal warnings that could have protected Freddie from the crises that ultimately brought it down. Fannie shareholders lost $52 billion as the stock plummeted 83 percent,while Freddie shareholders watched $36 billion go down the drain as its share price slumped 85 percent and its value sank to negative $5.6 billion. By the time the U.S. government extended a $2.25 billion credit line to each in July, Fannie's debts had reached $800 billion and Freddie's had reached $740 billion.

Payout: Zero. Regulators axed contract provisions that would have awarded both men hefty exit packages. Mudd was set to receive $9.3 million in exit pay, on top of his $12.4 million in salary, bonuses and stock profits. Syron's exit package could have amounted to at least $14.1 million. He has made $17.1 million in salary, bonuses and stock profits since becoming CEO in 2003.

CEO: Richard Fuld

Company: Lehman Brothers

On his watch: The firm declared bankruptcy on Sept. 15. In April he proclaimed to shareholders that "the worst is behind us," but for months he had dodged queries about the firm's exposure to toxic subprime debt.

Payout $22 million

CEO: Angelo Mozilo

Company: Country Financial

On his watch: The founder of the ill-fated mortgage giant, Angelo Mozilo, 69, was at the helm during the subprime fiasco that led to the broader credit crisis, Mozilo swore Countrywide would ride out the turmoil and emerge bigger than ever. Instead, he cashed out his stock options as Countrywide headed into a nosedive this year. To date, the company's worth has shrunk from about $25 billion to $2.5 billion.

Payout: $121.5 million. Mozilo gave up $36.4 million in severance pay, but is under SEC investigation for his $121.5 million stock gains.

CEO: Stanley O'Neal

Company: Merrill Lynch

On his watch: Shortly before his ouster last October, Merrill reported $7.9 billion in write-downs related to O'Neal's blundering forays into risky subprime-mortgage territory. O'Neal had snatched up subprime lender First Financial in late 2006, a move Portfolio magazine had likened to having "all the strategic wisdom of a foray into Havana real estate in 1959." Merrill's write-downs have since climbed to $45 billion.

Payout: $161.5 million

CEO: Charles Prince

Company: Citigroup

On his watch: Before he stepped down in November 2007, Citigroup, the world's largest bank, reported a 57 percent drop in quarterly earnings and lost nearly a quarter of its market value. "It is my judgment that -given the size of the recent losses in our mortgage-backed securities business, the only honorable course for me to take as chief executive officer is to step down, "he said.

Payout: $68 million

CEO: Jimmy Cayne

Company: Bear Stearns

On his watch: After serving as CEO for 15 years, Jimmy Cayne was conspicuously absent in the firm's final months. When Bear first disclosed mortgage losses last year, Cayne was at a Nashville bridge tournament. Eight months later, as Bear's non-executive chairman and as the company began its final descent, Cayne was at the North American Bridge Championships, where he could not be reached. Bear was sold days later to JPMorgan Chase at the bargain-basement price of about $10 a share, down from about $170 a share in 2007. Cayne had been worth about $1 billion in 2007, before Bear's demise shaved his savings down to about $600 million.

Payout: $61.3 million. Cayne and his wife dumped their Bear stock during the JPMorgan takeover. He will also receive another $4.6 million in JPMorgan stock.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008104003/cox-and-right-set-wall-streets-fall

Cox And The Right Set Up Wall Street's Fall

In 2005, our co-director Robert Borosage warned readers about the travesty of appointing Christopher Cox to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Business Week described corporate lobbyists as "almost giddy" at the prospect of Cox at the head of the SEC because Cox has devoted his career to shielding corporate executives from accountability. As an attorney, Cox was sued for touting a flimflam operator to regulators in a scam that ended up bilking small investors of some $130 million. As a legislator, Cox spearheaded the effort to pass the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which essentially gave corporate executives a "license to lie" about their stocks' future prospects and sought to shield CEOs, their lawyers and accountants from investor lawsuits. Cox also championed leaving stock options off the corporate books, encouraging the very instrument that gave CEOs a personal stake in fixing the books so they could cash in. President Bush has made a man who contributed directly to the explosion of corporate fraud and abuse that cost investors trillions of dollars the chief cop on the corporate beat. With the heat turned down on corporate cons, small investors are likely to get burned.

An article in The New York Times on Friday details how one rule changed in the mold of Cox's doctrinaire deregulatory mindset helped set up the collapse on Wall Street we're now dealing with. That rule, pushed by lobbyists from the nation's largest investment firms, allowed them in 2004 to add billions of dollars of debt to their books without the reserves to cover them. Then, it allowed the firms to police their own risk, using complex computer models.

The coup dé grace took place after Cox arrived at the SEC a year later, when he failed to give a high priority to an office tasked with monitoring institutions with $4 trillion in assets.

"Since March 2007, the office has not had a director," the Times reported. "And as of last month, the office had not completed a single inspection since it was reshuffled by Mr. Cox more than a year and a half ago."

It is reminiscent of the failures of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which since 2000 embraced the right-wing ideology of minimal regulation, voluntary compliance and no serious commitment to having cops on the beat to protect the public interest. The failures at the CPSC led to tainted food and toxic toys. The failures at the SEC, as everyone now knows, has brought up to the precipice of a potentially far more wide-reaching collapse of the economy.

It is a devastating indictment of anti-government, corporation-worshiping conservatism.

The Times quotes a former Republican SEC chairman (italics mine):

“It’s a fair criticism of the Bush administration that regulators have relied on many voluntary regulatory programs,” said Roderick M. Hills, a Republican who was chairman of the S.E.C. under President Gerald R. Ford. “The problem with such voluntary programs is that, as we’ve seen throughout history, they often don’t work.”

A long-time professor of securities and corporate law admits in the Times that his faith in the policies that the conservative leadership of the SEC was pursuing were wrong.

“We foolishly believed that the firms had a strong culture of self-preservation and responsibility and would have the discipline not to be excessively borrowing,” said Professor James D. Cox, an expert on securities law and accounting at Duke School of Law (and no relationship to Christopher Cox).

“Letting the firms police themselves made sense to me because I didn’t think the S.E.C. had the staff and wherewithal to impose its own standards and I foolishly thought the market would impose its own self-discipline. We’ve all learned a terrible lesson,” he added.

The paper also notes Cox's background and his track record at the SEC:

Christopher Cox had been a close ally of business groups in his 17 years as a House member from one of the most conservative districts in Southern California. Mr. Cox had led the effort to rewrite securities laws to make investor lawsuits harder to file. He also fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to executive stock options.

Under Mr. Cox, the commission responded to complaints by some businesses by making it more difficult for the enforcement staff to investigate and bring cases against companies. The commission has repeatedly reversed or reduced proposed settlements that companies had tentatively agreed upon. While the number of enforcement cases has risen, the number of cases involving significant players or large amounts of money has declined.

Mr. Cox dismantled a risk management office created by Mr. Donaldson that was assigned to watch for future problems. While other financial regulatory agencies criticized a blueprint by Mr. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, that proposed to reduce their stature — and that of the S.E.C. — Mr. Cox did not challenge the plan, leaving it to three former Democratic and Republican commission chairmen to complain that the blueprint would neuter the agency.

In the process, Mr. Cox has surrounded himself with conservative lawyers, economists and accountants who, before the market turmoil of recent months, had embraced a far more limited vision for the commission than many of his predecessors.

Marge Hurd, president of ACORN, said that the New York Times story should help put to rest the libel that the Wall Street implosion was caused by laws intended to ensure people of color and people in lower-income neighborhoods had fair access to credit.

"For the last few weeks, Americans have been deluged with polemics from right-wing pundits blaming regulation enacted in 1977 for the financial crisis we find ourselves in today. As today's explosive New York Times article shows, however, the 2004 decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission to eliminate the capital requirements on the major investment houses played the pivotal role in exposing our entire economy to the enormous risk of over-leveraged debt on predatory loans. ... As today's revelations demonstrate, a new era of re-regulation and close scrutiny is urgently needed, especially as American taxpayers prepare to foot the bill for Wall Street's misdeeds while getting no help to escape predatory mortgages."

When Sen. John McCain sought to score political points by saying that he would fire Cox if he were president—notwithstanding that the president can't legally fire an SEC chairman over policy disagreements—Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, correctly noted that the root problem was not Cox and his competence as an administrator. In fact, Cox did exactly what he was sent to the SEC to do: to take the chains off the dogs of Wall Street and let them run wild. Once again, it's not the man, it's the plan.

Now even many of the advocates of deregulation are now admitting that we have gone way too far. The question we must confront now is whether to trust the apparent deathbed conversions of those who now say that will curb the greed of Wall Street or will we now turn to those who we know were right all along.

[TreasonousBastard]

9. Better you should state why there should be...

just listing a bunch bigshots and how much they made is not enough.

Chase, BoA, and Wells Fargo (who you forgot) just helped to bail out the problem banks. Normally, they would be considered the good guys in this.

[RoyGBiv]

10. No thanks ...

My grandmother told me stories about 1933.

But not at bedtime.

I don't care to experience a live-action version.

[live love laugh]

11. Uhhhh...because they are almost all that's left after the consolidations? nt