Pay to Play – Obama’s fat cats
Obama laid blame to the entire financial meltdown to the finance industry. He trashed their bonuses as an example of why people don’t like banks right now.
He sang a different tune last year. He gladly accepted parts of their bonuses as the economy was melting down.
| Lehman Brothers | $ 344,609 |
| Bear Stearns | $ 60,754 |
| Citi | $ 440,335 |
| Bank of America | $ 284,286 |
| JP Morgan | $ 364,486 |
| Goldman Sachs | $ 685,305 |
| Morgan Stanley | $ 472,715 |
| American Express | $ 97,375 |
| US Bancorp | $ 1,650 |
| Capital One | $ 30,435 |
| Bank of New York Mellon | $ 13,885 |
| State Street Corp | $ 15,750 |
| PNC Bank | $ 5,750 |
| Wells Fargo | $ 199,988 |
| TOTAL | $ 3,017,323 |
Now that he’s responsible, that money’s suddenly bad. One day after trashing them on 60 Minutes, he’s having a private meeting with several leaders. Wanna guess how many of those companies in the first list are at this meeting? There’s a few on there that won’t be. They went bankrupt. Lehman Brothers gave $344,609 while filing for the largest bankruptcy the country has ever endured.
Bottom line, Citibank is prepared to pay back it’s share of TARP. From what I’ve read, that means it will all be paid back. There is nothing Obama can say these banks have actually done to harm the economy. The ones that did harm the economy, Lehman Brothers for example, got taken care of the way capitalism takes care of bad business practices. It shut them down. It doesn’t matter if they were too big to fail or not, they did.
What we are left with at this point is big banks being TOO conservative because they know the PR hell they’ll have to endure from Obama and Pelosi regardless of how much they are willing to take.
Constitution Club