Five years ago today, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Instantly and inevitably, the house of cards otherwise known as Wall Street collapsed. But after getting bailed out by the American taxpayers, Wall Street is doing just fine. The people of Main Street? Not so much. Here are some numbers to think about this Sunday morning. Amount the crash cost the U.S. economy: $22 trillion How much everyone would get if that $22 trillion were divided equally among the U.S. populace: $69,478.88 Assets of the four biggest banks in America — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wachovia/Wells Fargo — when they were “too big to fail” in 2008: $6.4 trillion Assets of those four banks today: $7.8 trillion Of the 63 former Lehman Brothers employees identified by a bankruptcy examiner as being aware of an accounting scheme Lehman used to mask its true finances, number who are employed in senior financial services positions today: 47 Number of the 25 banks responsible for the bulk of risky subprime loans leading up to the crash that are back in the mortgage business: 25 Chances that an American voter thinks that regulating financial products and services is “important” or “very important”: 9 in 10 Chances that an American knows the Earth orbits the sun: 8 in 10 Amount spent in 2012 by Wall Street and other finance industry behemoths on lobbying to roll back, water down and weasel out of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: $487 million Number of registered financial industry lobbyists in 2012: 2,429 Number of lawsuits filed as of April of this year by Eugene Scalia, son of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to hold up implementation of Dodd-Frank rules on legal technicalities: 7 Rank of finance industry among all corporate election spending by sector in 2011 and 2012: 1 Amount the industry gave to political candidates in 2011 and 2012: $664 million In 2012, rate at which revenues of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S., matched Public Citizen’s operating expenses for the entire year: Every 80 minutes Undeniably, these numbers are shocking, infuriating, damning. That’s why what you and I do as part of Public Citizen is so important. Together, we are fighting every day to challenge the corporate greed and political corruption behind numbers like these. And we’ve made impressive progress. Public Citizen led the charge for Wall Street reform from day one — which was a cinch for us, since we’d been aggressively opposing for many years before that the deregulation that predictably catalyzed the crash. We helped get Dodd-Frank enacted. And, behind the scenes in Congress, at the White House and in the courts, we’ve been a leader in the struggle to have the law enforced despite staggering resistance from Wall Street and its political puppets. We were instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as in the appointment and confirmation of its director, Richard Cordray. We’ve been among the loudest voices calling to break up the biggest banks, including Bank of America, and in exposing the sham of “too big to jail.” So let me give you one more statistic: Amount of the Matching Gift Offer a supporter just made to match every dollar you contribute right now: $50,000
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:01:17 +0000
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