Federal Reserve Joins Vendetta Politics of Obama Regime

Steve Forbes discusses the Federal Reserve action on its latest stress tests of the nation's 18 largest banks in his Fact & Comment in the 6 May issue of Forbes.  Of the 18 biggest banks, the Federal Reserve claimed four had serious problems which it said must be cleared up.  Ally Financial is the present name for GM's bankrupt and reorganized financial services arm.  It is in real trouble.  But Steve Forbes claims that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BB&T were named as having problems purely for small-minded political reasons.

JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon has expressed displeasure with the Obama administration, but it is a well-run company with a good balance sheet.  Goldman Sachs was too close to Romney and Lloyd Blankfein also made it clear he is not happy with Obama.  So, the Federal Reserve concocted reasons to fault these two institutions.

Most troubling was the claim that the best run major bank in the entire nation had serious problems because it uses its own economic models and judges its own loan portfolio differently than the Federal Reserve wants it to.  Independent thinking is discouraged, even when a company's track record justifies it to any rational observer.  In fact, if all banks work on one model, the risks of a systemic banking failure go up.  This is especially true when the dictated model is designed by bureaucrats for their purposes, not those of the private sector.  It is even more true when the appointments to the Federal Reserve are poisoned by Obama appointees.

Steve Forbes notes that the Basel Accords required banks to have heavy reserves for loans to even the best commercial companies, but none for loans to Greece or Iceland or Ireland.  Those government accords also enshrined mortgages for special low reserve treatment.  Look where these imposed government models led the world financial institutions in 2008 and 2009.

BB&T bank CEO John Allison IV, now retired and heading the Cato Institute, opposed the TARP program and was most forcefully forced to take that money in 2008-2009.  His bank was so well run it had no need for the money.  The Federal Reserve wanted to hide the worst banks by making sound banks take the money and it was hiding potential losses on its loans by making a forced profit in interest from sound banks that did not want the money in the first place.  Allison further earned the enmity of the Federal Reserve and the Obama Regime by writing The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure - Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope, published in 2013 by McGraw Hill.

Government thugs cannot stand the heat of criticism, especially when it is well-stated.  In the Obama Chicago style, they strike back brutally with the misuse of government power.  You do as they say, or they will breaka you knee caps.