Banks, bill to separate the commercial ones from the investment ones
It thundered so much that it rained (Socrates). She has been in Parliament presented a bill to separate commercial banks from investment banks. What should a commercial and investment bank do? The commercial bank should exercise, always with the authorization, the banking activity, i.e. the collection of savings from the public and the exercise of credit, while the investment bank should propose the entire offer of financial services aimed at companies, public institutions and financial institutions.
So, it seems that we are at a turning point regarding the dichotomy between the two exercises. So we return to what were the commercial banks and investment banks of US memory. Why did we come to this request? One reason is protect savers a little more from possible collapses of the investment banks which then have repercussions on the commercial ones.
A very recent example is that of subprime debts, closely followed by CDOs and CDSs which have weighed on thousands of billions of dollars and have involved not only the United States, but the entire planet. The subject is very delicate because we know that we cannot, for the moment, do without banks, but stricter regulation and more targeted and effective controls could give space to savings in generalknowing full well that those who save are neither a cow to be milked nor a pig, nothing of that is thrown away.
If the proposal were to pass it would be interesting, as repeatedly stated, that there was also greater control over administrators who occasionally invent convoluted forms of “management” of savings endorsed by the “opinions” of rating agencies and then eventually it turns out that it is not they who pay, but the market. A sentence from last week that struck me: a theft of takeaways worth 4.75 euros (four euros and seventy-five cents) aggravated by shoving the Civic Guard, sentenced to almost a year in prison (one should never steal), while those who fraudulently managed the bank and received millionaire bonuses are still around; only to then retaliate against savers (see Bail in).
To return to the subject, the governments of the 1980s abolished the Glass-Stegall act of 1933 and which precisely provided for the separation between commercial and investment activities following the great crash of 1929. Evidently the lesson was not enough and the aftermath of the 2008 is the confirmation and we still carry it with us both as savers and as banks and coincidentally the “guilty” did not pay …
Indeed, he roams the button rooms with impunity. Will we ever have an end? But we must always remember that: vulpes pilum mutat non mores – the fox loses its fur, but not the vice (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Life of Vespasian).
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