Banking Elites Slam Yellen, Call for Public Banks & Breakup of Big Wall Street

http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/these_banking_elites_just_called_for_public_banks_breakup_of_big_wall_street

A former top Federal Reserve policy adviser, and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have stunned the banking world by calling for public banks and the breakup of big banks.

Andrew Levin is surely one of the most (formerly) high-ranking monetary policy advisors to call for publicly-owned banks, in this case calling for the Fed's 12 regional outposts to be made government entities rather than privately-owned banks. At the beginning of this week, he called "for the Fed's 12 regional outposts to be made government entities, rather than owned, as they have been since their inception more than a century ago, by the banks they regulate."

And Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari used to be the "bailout czar" in Washington, "charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the financial crisis," according to Jordan Weissmann, senior business and economics correspondent for Slate. In other words, Kashkari helped design TARP and other programs to save the big banks he now wants to break up.

Consciousness of banking as a public utility seems to underlie not only the two gentlemen's policy ideas, but the media as well. The Reuters reporters who wrote on Levin's call for public regional fed banks pointed out in their piece that "the U.S. central bank is the world's only major central bank that is not fully public."And actually, Kashkari's call for "turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail" is an offhanded call for banking in the public interest.