US Bank President to the Little People: "Get over it."

U.S. Bank President Richard Davis was in the Twin Cities a couple days ago and spoke at a Minnesota Chamber of Commerce event. There were protestors outside but he mainly ignored them as everyone enjoyed their hot dish. However, his one comment about them was enlightening:

"'Everybody's breaking the rules, blah blah blah,'" Davis said at one point, admonishing the assembled business leaders to "get over it."

Who are these people wondering what the OWS movement's demands are? Let's start with prosecuting assholes like Richard Davis for what Yves Smith calls "bank looting".

1. Violation of REMIC (real estate mortgage conduit) rules, which are IRS provisions which allow mortgage backed securities to be treated as pass-through entities...Moreover, when the senior enforcement officer in the IRS was alerted last year, she was keenly interested. But the word that came back was the the question had gone to the White House, and the answer was to nix going after these violations...this is prima facie evidence of an Administration policy of protecting the banks.

2. Consumer fraud under HAMP. Catherine Masto of Nevada has already delineated this case in her second amended complaint against numerous Bank of America entities (in fact, the evidently clueless President could find a raft of other litigation ideas in her filing). All the servicers engaged in similar egregious conduct.

3. Securities fraud by mortgage trustees and serivcers. While the statute of limitations for securities fraud for the sale of toxic mortgage securities in the runup to the crisis has now passed, securitization trustees and servicers are making false certifications in periodic SEC filings. In layperson terms, the trustee certifies that everything is kosher with the trust assets. As readers well know, in many cases the custodians do not have the notes or they were not conveyed to the trust as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement (as in they were not properly endorsed through the chain of title).

4. Widespread risk management failures as Sarbanes-Oxley violations. As we’ve discussed, Sarbox provides a fairly low risk path to criminal prosecutions. And we believe the SEC has been incorrectly deterred by an adverse ruling in the early stages of its case against Angelo Mozilo.

"A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion" (Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations)

While I don't mean to simply appeal to authority here, I thought it was a nice quote considering reports I've read today which detail just how little income tax many corporations pay. Andrew Leonard up at Salon looked at a new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

37 of the United States’ biggest corporations paid zero taxes in 2010...The list of companies that paid zero taxes is only the beginning of the travesties documented by the report. The authors looked at the tax filings from 2008-2010 of 280 of the nation’s biggest, most successful corporations. These companies reported $1.4 trillion worth of profit during a period when most Americans were struggling to stay afloat. The authors discovered that the average effective tax rate — what the companies really paid after government subsidies, tax breaks and various tax dodges were taken into account — was only 18.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate. Fully a quarter of the 280 companies paid under 10 percent.

But this isn't just the case with IBM and Verizon; it's nearly the same here in Wisconsin as Mike Ivey noted:

Now, the IWF is out with a report showing four nameplate corporations in Wisconsin are avoiding state taxes at the same time they are booking huge profits, cutting local workforces and handing out fat paychecks to top executives.

The four firms also booked a combined $29 billion in profits and paid $0 in state corporate income taxes -- save for Kimberly-Clark, which did pay in three of those 10 years, according to the IWF report.

Isn't that just tits.

Matt Taibbi has another reason to hate Wall Street - those people cheat:

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent...

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics.

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.

Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.

Getting back to Mr. Davis, it seems he and his institution have no problem kicking people when they're down as this article at Huffington Post shows. U.S. Bank imposes some pretty hefty fees on the debit cards used by some states as a method for paying unemployment insurance.

Out of work and living on a $189-a-week unemployment check, Rob Linville needs to watch every penny.

The state of Oregon, where Linville lives, deposits his weekly benefits on a U.S. Bank prepaid debit card. The bank allows him to make four withdrawals per month free of charge. After that, he must pay $1.50 for each visit to the ATM and $3 to see a teller. Managing his basic expenses, including rent, bus fare and groceries, typically requires more than four withdrawals, he says. Unexpected needs -- Linville recently bought a sport coat for $20 to prepare for a job interview -- entail more. He's afraid to withdraw his full benefits in one shot, knowing that the bank could sock him with a $17.50 overdraft fee if he exceeds his balance. So he pulls out small amounts of cash as he needs it, incurring about $15 in fees in the last two months he says.

Crucifixion is too good for Richard Davis.