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Bank of America getting ready to stiff American taxpayers again

Matt Taibbi is urging Occupy Wall Street to encourage people to pull their money out of the big banks, starting with Bank of America, which has just, apparently legally, and with the encouragement of the Fed, just offloaded trillions of dollars of bad bets onto the taxpayers.

Obviously Goldman, Sachs has become the great symbol of investment banking corruption, and other companies like AIG and Countrywide have become poster children for problems with businesses like insurance and mortgage-lending. But when it comes to commercial banking, Bank of America is as bad as it gets.

The markets, of course, have lately come to agree, as B of A has lately been downgraded again to just above junk status. The only reason the bank is not rated even lower than that is that it is Too Big To Fail. The whole world knows that if Bank of America implodes – whether because of the vast number of fraud suits it faces for mortgage securitization practices, or because of the time bomb of toxic assets on its balance sheets – the U.S. government will probably step in to one degree or another and save it.

The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.

This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.

There is a very easy way to stop the banks from pulling this sort of stuff: reinstate Glass-Steagal. The fact that no one in power is actually talking about doing that is telling. Instead, we have the spectacle of the “Volcker rule”, which poor Volcker has disavowed. Rube Goldberg couldn’t have come up with something so complicated, and, once the lobbyists are done with it, it will be so full of holes that it will be worthless.

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