Certainly one could do the same for TBTF banks. One could take over a bank holding corporation, and keep open all the offices. So why not? Because the powers that be in the USA want to preserve the system as it is, with all its derivatives, and mixing of government power with the casino, the whole thing privately managed. So the financial pirates threaten to close the ATMs, for all to hear. That should add one more count to their indictments: blackmail against the People of the USA! But that threat is empty.

What is happening is that the decision makers have been bought, explictly, or not. Therein the powers of the “banks”. Obama and al., or Krugman, for that matter, tell you that, if you go TOO fundamental in changing things in finance, you will break the Washington-New York axis, who they view as the USA itself.

It’s a sort of argument very well known:”They are sons of bitches, but they are our sons of bitches.” Obama said as much on “The View”.
PA

That is because they have and continue to threaten to take down the entire world commerce system.

And they can.

They are not kidding.

Also JFK had all the gifts society could give: money, power, aura… and knowledge (“My father used to say all businessmen are son of bitches, now I know how true it is”…) JFK absolutely did not have that infuriating love and wonder of the little child who has just sitten in Father Christmas’ lap as Obama evokes the crook who has the traits of Warren Buffet. Maybe Barack should make is so that Warren gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

So the ship has sailed, indeed. So did the Bismarck after its artillery duel with the still under construction HMS Prince of Wales. And yet, pierced through, it was losing fuel and speed. It had to go for repairs, and could not raid, as intended. The rest is history, which finished down at the bottom of the ocean (after opening all the food and dring reserves of the Bismarck on the last night, so the Nazis went down in style!)

If the banksters are seriously hindered by the (more or less) existing regulations, they may know the fate of the Bismarck.
The fact that the right wing British government is thinking about nationalizing RBS to create a giant bank to lend to the SMEs (as the French Socialists are also thinking of doing) is pretty telling.
Germany does not have that problem as acutely because the Mittelstand (German SMEs) is made of owner-operators in financial autonomy (partly because they are more exploitative, some will say, and the Germans more sheep like, than, say, the French, who are always complaining…)

To get the GM type deal was easy, as the bank owning corps were then bankrupt. But then Obama was golfing all the time with Wolf, the fat USA UBS head, apparently involved in UBS’s apparently criminal (massive conspiracy for tax evasion) activities. Wolf has resigned from UBS (the least UBS could do, and he was probably left there very long to make it appear he was not a gangster, because otherwise why was not he pushed out right away?).

When one golfs with a criminal all the time, one’s judgement has got to become crime friendly.
PA

1. JFK was younger, and while he was unable to get Medicare and Civil Rights bills through Congress, he at least got them INTO Congress. LBJ got them enacted as JFK’s legacy.

2. Perhaps we should remember what Dick Durbin said about the bankers “owning the place.”

THEY DO.

And, as a result, they have more POWER than the US Federal Govt.

So perhaps that ship has sailed.

I think we (taxpayers) should have gotten a GM type deal out of the banking bailout, we didn’t.