Personally I want to hear Bartiromo’s response

Personally I want to hear Bartiromo’s response, and I am sure the rest of America would as well , don't you?

Barney Frank Leaves Wall Street Defenders Speechless: Why Are Bankers ‘Paying Themselves So Much Money?’

By Alan Pyke on September 15, 2013 at 1:23 pm

As his fellow panelists sought to sidestep criticisms of the financial industry on the five-year anniversary of the bank failure that kicked the financial crisis and Great Recession into full swing, former congressman Barney Frank asked a simple question that brought Wall Street’s defenders up short. “To your question about those poor beleaguered bankers who have been forced to do so much,” Frank said, “why are they paying themselves so much money? Where did these enormous salaries come from if they were in fact in such serious trouble?”
Frank was responding to CNBC host Maria Bartiromo’s call to “get beyond the conversation of is Wall Street evil, are the bankers evil and causing pain” and instead look to economic growth as a cure-all for the vast inequality in income and wealth that has been exacerbated since the end of the recession. (Nevermind that the deregulation of the financial sector is a primary driver of inequality in the U.S.) His question produced several seconds of silence as Bartiromo and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson laughed nervously and looked to Meet The Press host David Gregory for help. As Bartiromo seemed about to respond to Frank, Gregory stepped in to change the subject.
Watch the exchange below:

BARTIROMO: We need to get beyond the conversation of is Wall Street evil? Are the bankers evil and causing pain? And toward the conversation of, how do you create sustainable economic growth? That will answer the issue of inequality. Because with growth comes jobs.
[...]
BARNEY FRANK: I do want to add one thing, though, to your question about those poor beleaguered bankers who have been forced to do so much to keep from not being able to pay their debts they can’t lend money. if they really are running businesses that are so stressed that they can’t do their basic work, why are they paying themselves so much money? Where did these enormous salaries come from if they were in fact in such serious trouble?
BARTIROMO: (laughing) Thank you for giving me that one. Okay.
GREGORY (Host): But your point is to get beyond — to get beyond some of the resentment of the bankers and get to a place where we actually have more hiring going on, more investment going on and washington plays a more constructive role beyond whether it was the bailout of the banks which changed our politics.

It would have been interesting to hear Bartiromo’s response had Gregory not intervened to prevent anyone answering Frank’s question. Wall Street executive pay seems difficult to defend five years on from the crisis. It isn’t just that banker bonuses and bank profits have returned to or even surpassed pre-crisis highs. It’s that a third of the highest-paid executives of the past 20 years have been failures or frauds. It’s that companies routinely manipulate performance-based compensation schemes to effectively guarantee executive payouts. It’s that taxpayers subsidize payments in the form of stock, which also give executives incentive to the sorts of fraud and risk-taking that created the financial crisis.
The financial reform law that Frank co-authored with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) included rules meant to change executive compensation. Those changes have yet to materialize. Five years on from the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, former Lehman chief Dick Fuld is far from the only former executive to have retained hundreds of millions of dollars in pay and bonuses for their work that contributed to the crisis. Efforts to change the culture of the financial industry appear to have failed, as traders still report a high willingness to break the rules for personal gain.

JPMorgan Chase Fires Back At Warren-McCain Plan To Reinstate Glass-Steagall

WOW , WHO IS SURPRISED AT THIS ONE .. TAKE THEM DOWN SENATOR WARREN!

Shocking news: JPMorgan Chase is not exactly jazzed about some recent plans to regulate banks, including Elizabeth Warren and John McCain's bill to reinstate the Glass-Steagall law splitting investment and commercial banks.
Even more shocking: JPMorgan seems to think it will probably be able to water down or avoid these plans.
In a Friday conference call to discuss the bank's second-quarter profits, an analyst asked whether the Warren-McCain bill to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law would hurt business at the biggest U.S. bank by assets. JPMorgan's chief financial officer, Marianne Lake, dismissed the whole idea.
"Glass-Steagall didn't have anything to do with the crisis," Lake said, "and our business model allowed us to be a port in the storm. Our customers like doing business with us in the model we have now, so ..." She trailed off, took a long pause, and then added: "We don't spend time thinking about that."
In another not-exactly-stunning development, JPMorgan CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon grumbled just a bit about new rules proposed by U.S. regulators this week limiting how much risk big U.S. banks will be allowed to take on. Specifically, he grumbled about how those rules are stricter than proposed global rules, and how that gap could make U.S. banks less competitive.
"If you have a world where some businesses have to have two times as much capital as other companies, over time that can create a huge competitive disadvantage," Dimon said. "We have interest in a safe and sound system, but not for a hugely imbalanced competitive playing field."
But Dimon also suggested that regulators are aware of these discrepancies and are trying to "harmonize" their efforts -- and who doesn't love harmony, especially when it makes it easier for banks to get more leveraged and dangerous?

Similarly, Lake suggested there were "fundamental issues" with proposed new rules limiting banks' riskiness and forcing them to seek out more capital. She suggested that regulators seem to be willing to consider having mercy on the banks and loosening up some of those fetters.
What is ironic is that the new capital and leverage proposals don't seem to create all that much of a hardship for banks, at least not for JPMorgan -- as DealBreaker's Matt Levine points out, the bank admits that about the worst that might happen is that it will not be able to shovel cash out the door to shareholders quite as quickly as it had hoped. Not exactly the econopocalypse bank flaks are predicting.
Anyway, seeing regulators back down on these rules would hardly be shocking. We have already seen aggressive bank lobbyists water down, muddle and delay implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. JPMorgan alone spent $8 million last year lobbying on financial reform and other issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As for the Glass-Steagall revival, the consensus on Wall Street and in Washington is that it stands pretty much no chance of becoming law. JPMorgan argues that its own size and complexity is super-attractive to customers, and that argument will probably win the day. The competing argument -- that the country enjoyed decades of relative financial calm after the segregation of bank activities after the Great Depression, and that it fell into a financial crisis not long after the removal of those safeguards -- is not taken seriously.
For what it's worth, Former Rep. Barney Frank -- the Frank in Dodd-Frank -- basically agreed with JPMorgan's Lake about Glass-Steagall, telling CNBC on Friday that he didn't think reinstating the law was nearly as important to the safety of the financial system as reforming the trade of the credit derivatives that nearly helped bring down that system the last time. And of course JPMorgan is lobbying hard on that issue, too.