"...banks should remain in private hands"

On Feb. 23, 2009 the Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS, and the Federal Reserve made a joint statement concluding with the following paragraph.

"Currently, the major U.S. banking institutions have capital in excess of the amounts required to be considered well capitalized. This program is designed to ensure that these major banking institutions have sufficient capital to perform their critical role in our financial system on an ongoing basis and can support economic recovery, even under an economic environment that is more challenging than is currently anticipated. The customers and the providers of capital and funding can be assured that as a result of this program participating banks will be able to move forward to provide the credit necessary for the stabilization and recovery of the U.S. economy. Because our economy functions better when financial institutions are well managed in the private sector, the strong presumption of the Capital Assistance Program is that banks should remain in private hands."

The April 26 NY Times article entitled Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club should be read carefully because it gives a strong indication of the meaning of "private hands."

Even though Hussein Ibish might accuse me of anti-Semitism as a consequence, I did a quick count on the ethnic backgrounds of the people mentioned in the article.

Jewish Wallstreeters and Jewish US Government Overseers

1. Michele Davis
2. H. Rodgin Cohen
3. Jamie Dimon
4. Robert E. Rubin
5. Sanford I. Weill
6. Ben S. Bernanke
7. Lawrence H. Summers
8. Lewis A. Sachs
9. Alan Greenspan
10. Lewis B. Kaden
11. Sheila C. Bair
12. William Poole
13. Lloyd C. Blankfein
14. David G. Nason
15. Ralph L. Schlosstein
16. Mark A. Patterson
17. Lewis S. Alexander

Non-Jewish Wallstreeters and Non-Jewish US Government Overseers

1. Timothy F. Geithner (He was originally described in Wikipedia as Jewish, but the line was removed. His wife seems to be descended from the German Jewish Sonnenfeld family although her immediate family seems to have been areligious. On Wall Street it would probably be enough to gain admittance into the Jewish social network especially with a generous amount of support for the State of Israel. In any case he seems to have made an effort to establish his Israel-sympathetic credentials as soon as the Obama administration took office by focusing on the use of economic sanctions against Iran.)
2. John C. Dugan
3. E. Gerald Corrigan
4. William J. McDonough
5. William C. Dudley
6. Edward T. Patrikis
7. Henry Paulson
8. Charles O. Prince
9. Thomas G. Maheras
10. Janet Tavakoli
11. Robert B. Willumstad
12. Vincent Reinhart
13. Neil M. Barofsky

Neither Wallstreeter Nor US Government Overseer

1. Joseph E. Stiglitz (Jewish)
2. Willem H. Buiter (Non-Jewish)
3. Nouriel Roubini (Iranian Jewish)
4. Callum McCarthy (Non-Jewish)
5. Philipp Hildebrand (Non-Jewish)
6. Karen Shaw Petrou (Non-Jewish)

Because the ethnicities should have been far closer to a random sample and because Jews are only a very small percentage of the US population, the relative proportions are breath-taking even if talking about them has been considered politically incorrect -- at least until recently.

Family Guy cartoon mocks assumption of Jewish financial wizardry.
Note that the show was canceled/suspended for two years because of this episode. Yet there is no Jewish lobby.

Because I have met most of the Jewish Wallstreeter/Government group at conferences, talks and consulting jobs, I can safely say that they mostly belong to Jewish social networks built around Jewish identity and commitment to Zionism.

Until this situation changes, Jewish Zionists (or -- as I prefer to say -- the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland) simply have a stranglehold on US politics, foreign policy, the media and the economy.

As any competent, honest scholar of Central and Eastern Jewish studies could explain, the phenomenon of disproportionate Jewish control is hardly new.

From Jewish Zionist Dehumanization of Non-Jews:

In Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (pp. 235-6), Paul Kriwaczek discusses Jewish role in Ukraine, which was at that time part of Commonwealth Poland.

This Yiddish takeover of the wild and lawless Ukraine's economy could be expected to have involved much exploitation and corrupt abuse of monopoly. Jews tried hard to keep such businesses as the collection of customs dues and taxes to themselves. Surviving customs records from the 1580s are written in a mixture of Yiddish and Hebrew. The historian Shimon Dubnow quotes a resolution passed by the Jewish Lithuanian Council, the Vaad Medina Litoh, ruling body of the Jewish estate: "We have openly seen the great danger deriving from the operation of customs in Gentile hands; for the customs to be in Jewish hands is a pivot on which everything turns, since thereby Jews may exert control."

I have worked off and on in Wall Street since the 80s and am fairly certain that banking could be at least as computerized as drafting.

What would we get with far fewer human bankers?

• There would no longer be an elite effectively taxing the economy and providing nothing in return (as in 16th century Poland above).
  
• There would no longer be tests of Zionist political correctness in the venture capital or other corporate finance process.
  
• The sort of financial skullduggery that created the economic disaster would be much more difficult. And
  
• the few remaining bankers/regulators, who should be civil servants working at civil service wages, would be more likely to owe their jobs to competence than to ethnic chumminess and connections.

Further Reading

Screen grabs:

After becoming the nation's youngest bank president at 25, the recent Harvard graduate [Joseph P. Kennedy] looked westward to make money, saying in 1919 that the motion picture "is another telephone." Hollywood was dominated by former furriers, tailors, and glovemakers, nearly all of them Jewish. They were unprepared for the Boston Irish cyclone who bought failing studios, restored them, and usually made a profit. Kennedy's financial wizardry affected RKO, Warner Bros., and Paramount. He "cleared a profit of at least $4,250,000 on the RKO deal alone," the author notes. In 1928, that was serious money.

While I would not so casually dismiss the financial experience of late 19th and early 20th century E. European Jews, Kennedy's unqualified negative view of Hollywood indicates that the hegemonic discourse of Jewish financial genius had not yet been established in the 1920s. Sphere: Related Content