Big Banks No Fail, Say Big Banks

No, that's a misleading headline. According to Reuters, the accurate quote is "Top Banks Say They Not Too Big to Fail." Actually, according to FishbowlNY, a Neanderthal headline writer at Reuters misquoted The Big Banks.They never said they not too big to fail. They said that if they do fail, they will not require taxpayer assistance to hasten their own destruction. They can self-immolate all by themselves, thank you very much. Or, if they do decide to live, they can administer their own CPR without government aid. These banksters no longer believe in public-subsidized health care, good little libertarians that they are. Or so they say.

According to an obscure portion of the monstrously defanged and defunded Dodd-Frank Act, bank regulators would supposedly put the failures out of their misery and bill the patient for their services. But if the Jamie Dimon situation is any example, regulators and CEOs are the same animal. There is no murder-suicide pact in Dodd-Frank. (I am of course writing figurately and not suggesting that Jamie should physically harm either of his selves: either the JPMorgan Chase self or the regulator on the New York Fed.)

Here. according to Reuters, is a subtle hint that the banksters' "Living Wills" are not worth the paper they're written on:

But some experts doubt how hard regulators will push the banks for changes or how useful hypothetical resolution plans will be in major financial crisis.

The public portions released on Tuesday and are a few dozen pages per bank summarizing thousands of pages submitted confidentially to regulators.

The banks argued in the public documents that their resolution plans will work, with no cost to taxpayers or great consequence to the financial system. They used technical generalities in their conclusions without specifically addressing the unpredictable and vicious nature of a credit crisis.

Viciously and unspecifically unpredictable. "Big Banks Say They Lie Through Their Predatory Fangs" is the real headline, folks. Just like LIBOR should really be LIE MORE  -- although it's actually a great big bore to the un-outrageable general public.