Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Bart Chilton, CFTC Commissioner
After the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, after endless hearings in Congress going nonstop since 2008, after the voluminous report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, one would think we should know a great deal about the largest Wall Street banks that created the havoc and that stringent laws would have quickly been put in place to prevent another repeat.
Tragically, a Nation that can transmit trading data between New York and Chicago in 13.1 milliseconds, still has no idea what the biggest banks on Wall Street own or what threats those black holes of information pose to the national economy. This lack of transparency, combined with the failure of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation to, as yet, impose restraints on speculative trading (Volcker rule) and position limits on trades, renders the Wall Street of today even more dangerous than the Wall Street of 2008.
The exponentially greater danger of Wall Street today results from the harsh reality that the U.S. can no longer financially afford another bailout given the size of the U.S. debt and the mushroomed balance sheet of the Federal Reserve – both inflated because of the last Wall Street blowup.
The reality of just how little has changed despite five years of economic hemorrhaging was brought into stark focus in a speech delivered by Bart Chilton, a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on August 5 of this year.
Chilton referred to Wall Street as the “cowboy companies” and said they were delivering a “Wild West” economy to the U.S. In terms of understanding what these companies own and the attendant risks, Chilton had this to say:
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