Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley may eventually escape proprietary trading ban
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley may ultimately avoid a ban on bank proprietary trading under the Wall Street overhaul.
As part of the Senate financial regulatory debate, Democrats want to bar big banks from proprietary trading. Large non-banks would face potentially higher capital standards under the legislation to account for their trading activities. The restrictions are part of an amendment sponsored by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) that has yet to come up for a Senate vote.
Julie Edwards, spokeswoman for Merkley, said on Tuesday that two of Wall Street's heavyweights -- Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- would not fall under the explicit prohibition in the future if they decided to no longer function as bank holding companies.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley converted to bank holding companies during the financial crisis in 2008.
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This sickens me...how about you?
Goldman Sachs and Helicopter Ben
You may ask: how is that possible? Are they that good? The reason is that they are taking advantage of free money from the Fed:
“The trading profits of the Street is just another way of measuring the subsidy the Fed is giving to the banks,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Torrance, California-based Institutional Risk Analytics. “It’s a transfer from savers to banks.”
The trading results, which helped the banks report higher quarterly profit than analysts estimated even as unemployment stagnated at a 27-year high, came with a big assist from the Federal Reserve. The U.S. central bank helped lenders by holding short-term borrowing costs near zero, giving them a chance to profit by carrying even 10-year government notes that yielded an average of 3.70 percent last quarter.
The gap between short-term interest rates, such as what banks may pay to borrow in interbank markets or on savings accounts, and longer-term rates, known as the yield curve, has been at record levels. The difference between yields on 2- and 10-year Treasuries yesterday touched 2.71 percentage points, near the all-time high of 2.94 percentage points set Feb. 18.
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