We’re listening to the bank CEO press conference after their meeting with the president at the White House. And among other comments Jim Rohr, chairman and chief executive of Pittsburgh’s PNC Financial Services Group, has just noted that the financial services industry is the “biggest industry we have in the United States.” I take it that some of that metric may be tied to just how one defines and delimits what constitutes an ‘industry’. But this points up a basic structural problem. The point of the financial services ‘industry’ is to efficiently allocate capital throughout the economy or to put it a bit more cheekily to actual ‘industries’. Now, that’s a critical function. But when it becomes the biggest ‘industry’, and in many ways clearly the most powerful, that’s a problem.
Sen. Arlen Specter’s probable primary challenger Pat Toomey teams up with Joe The Plumber.
We’re trying to pull together the many moving parts of the AIG story. And here’s some more on one issue that seems particularly important. Yesterday we mentioned that the chief risk officer at AIG, strange as it may seem, still has his job. But now we find that like AIG’s in-house auditors and its outside accountancy, the risk assessing team itself was not given full access to the book of AIG Financial Products.
The next step will be to get some read on just when it was that AIGFP Chief Joe Cassano started shutting everyone out. And what didn’t he want them to see?
TPM Reader PW with some more thoughts on the size of the finance ‘industry’ …
Absolutely. You’ve probably been noticing some people talking about “overcapacity” in the finance industry, and in a sense this is what they’re talking about. It’s like the auto industry’s ability to produce way more cars than the world needs or wants to buy in a given year, only worse. Worse because finance wizards, like doctors, are also the ones
telling you how much of their product you need to buy to maximize your investment returns — indeed, in the case of funds that they manage, they’re the ones who make that decision for you. So the more masters of the universe there are (attracted by the way-higher-than-median compensation) the more trading and the more deals you need to generate the commissions and underwriting profits to keep them in cigars and
summer homes. And the more they tilt the playing field to divert surpluses to themselves, leading to more of the “best and brightest” going into finance…So what we really need is a downsizing along the lines of the auto industry’s, against a lobby that makes the AMA and the legal profession look like the Society of Friends.
After months of litigation, Fox Business News managed to get a thick ream of TARP office emails through a FOIA request. Neel Kashkari figures prominently. And we’ve got some of the choice details.
If you’ve yet to sate your daily appetite for Michele Bachmann’s unique brand of slapstick fascism, don’t forget the ‘Bachmann Effect‘ from earlier this week.
This morning brought news that Democrat Scott Murphy has a tiny lead in the latest poll of the New York-20 special election. And now comes word that Eric Sundwall, the Libertarian candidate who Tedisco’s supporters were able to boot off the ballot at the last minute, is endorsing Murphy.
Larry Sabato suggests Rep. Michele Bachmann bone up on what Marxism actually is or maybe just take a tranquilizer.