Spending makes our economy go round. I am glad they will be hiring entertainment and help. I wish they would spend more.

because they're all desperate for work these days.

How else do you get smaller?

Wow I am sure that will thrill the crowd here.

Too big to fail, too big to legislate, too big to regulate, too big to prosecute (for fear of the snowball to the economy) - break them up and make them compete as local/regionals - yet this is anathema to you.

Let me control my feigned shock and just ask what your plan is.

Thanks in advance.

We need for all parts of the company to adhere to US leverage restrictions or be separate such that it can't bring down the whole.

There needs to be a company wide risk model and there needs to be more transparency.

I do think its true that if the government is backstopping the banks they deserve to see it all and to curtail excessive leverage or exposure.

Banking will probably be changing as technology moves forward. If we forced banks to break up, they may just find they have no need for those employees anyway. I think it will be more of a loss to employees than to the banks.

I'm quite moved.

My employer is not US based, so not following your UK rant. We have stronger leverage requirements than US-based banks. Banking is most certainly changing. There is way less foot traffic in branches than years before, but there is still an underlying distrust with banking over the internet.

As for backstopping (ie, taxpayer dollars) - SO glad you brought this up. Care to relate it to the revolving door of US regulation and the parties mentioned in the OP? See a correlation there, or no?

And now that we got all of the weird UK-subsidiary and online banking random non-answers out of the way, let me ask you this again, and this time I will rephrase:

Short of nationalizing the lot and putting them under the USPS (which would potentially shore that organization up), what is your plan?

So that is my plan.

There are enough credit unions and local banks around to produce adequate competition, much more so than Cell service or broadband service. I bank with a local credit union and got my mortgage from a local bank.

when we start regulating them and close off the revolving door.

Bonus points - install a transaction tax on trades and I will shut up permanently.

Yet they want to gut every program I want my tax dollars to pay for. They win, I lose. We lose. As usual.

Interesting story by Poe.

8 Huge Corporate Handouts in the Fiscal Cliff Bill
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/8-huge-corporate-handouts-fiscal-cliff-bill

"Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

5) Subsidies for Goldman Sachs Headquarters – Sec. 328 extends 'tax exempt financing for York Liberty Zone,' which was a program to provide post-9/11 recovery funds. Rather than going to small businesses affected, however, this was, according to Bloomberg, 'little more than a subsidy for fancy Manhattan apartments and office towers for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp.' Michael Bloomberg himself actually thought the program was excessive, so that’s saying something. According to David Cay Johnston’s The Fine Print, Goldman got $1.6 billion in tax free financing for its new massive headquarters through Liberty Bonds."