Don't Be So Hard on the Bankers

Banks have been allowed, thanks to your Congress and mine, to charge interest at amazing rates, while ringing up "fees" for late payments and the like at $29 per and then raising your rates on your credit card at anytime they like.

What is the rate that the large banks are getting money loaned from the Fed at right now?--between zero and .25%? Anyone on here being loaned money at less than 4.25% on home mortgages or credit cards at 8% or home equity lines at 6%? I didn't think so.

And when the giant banks lose tons of money, do they go out of business like the small banks? No, instead they are given billions from taxpayer funds directly to cover their losses so that they can figure out some great scheme to fleece the public ones again. (I guess the Fed charging .25% was too high a rate for the banks to want to pay back.)

But, of course, they are careful with the money we give them--well, that is, if you don't count the millions at AIG and billions at Merrill Lynch/Bank of America in bonuses, or the trips to the spa resorts, or the stock option gains (like Blankestein at Goldman Sachs, who only made $700 million in 2007--yet a year later his company almost went out of business, or Richard Fuld at Lehmann Brothers, who made over $40 million the year before that company went bankrupt).

And, of course, they are honest, but just had a little trouble doing their job. I guess that's why Fuld, after Lehmann's bankruptcy sold his share of his $13 million mansion to his wife for $10. (Sounds similar to Madoff's wife holding over $78 million in assets while he's in jail.)

Sorry, Tim, if we seem a little hard on the big bankers, but maybe that's because we are tired of this shell game and want the regulators to do their job, and this fraud on the American taxpayers to end. We would hope that you would want the same.

G. Kelly of CA 4:04AM March 30, 2009