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That is certainly not all the US banks, just the TBTFs and some of the next tier down. Simon Johnson recently wrote that Bill Hoenig of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City is being brought to Washington as a top officer of the FDIC because he believes even a bank such as BOA can and should be put through a resolution process. If there is a reasonable chance of this being done with integrity and working, and I suspect there is, it should be attempted with BOA, Citi and Wells Fargo.

My fear is more that the process will be subverted politically and that wealthy malefactors will get to keep their money and power more than that it will be impossible to resolve a "TBTF". If you don't want to do something it is always nice if it is impossible.

But, even if a resolution fails and the whole system crashes, I believe that would be better than continuing as we are going. The longer this runs the greater the damage. And no real recovery is possible until the current bad debt is written down, and, probably, until the current financial incumbents are removed from power.

The only reason for temporizing is to spread awareness of the nature of the existing system and the need for fundamental change. The occupy movement is doing that and I suspect that the current effort to wall paper the Euro elephant will fail massively the first time the elephant moves -- which will be soon.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Oct 30th, 2011 at 05:13:01 PM EST
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As I said the other day, I think the various global TPTB and the TBTF (including them there Chinese ones) can wiggle and squiggle all they want, when the hammer comes down they are going to be sucking eggs along with the rest of us.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
by ATinNM on Sun Oct 30th, 2011 at 05:20:32 PM EST
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I was really responding to this comment, which seemed to caution against writing down the bad debt.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Oct 30th, 2011 at 06:03:17 PM EST
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Link for Simon Johnson article about Bill Hoenig.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Oct 30th, 2011 at 05:55:41 PM EST
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