More on Banks

...yet another tale of big banks as parasite - this time bid rigging in local bond issuances...

"The scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia" - from the Rolling Stone Magazine

"It turns into a kind of unbroken Möbius strip of corruption – the banks pay middlemen to rig auctions, the middlemen bribe politicians to win business, then the politicians choose the middlemen to run the auctions, leading right back to the banks bribing the middlemen to rig the bids. When we allow Wall Street to continually raid the public cookie jar, we're not just enriching a bunch of petty executives ... we're effectively creating an alternate government, one in which money lifted from the taxpayer's pocket through mob-style schemes turns into a kind of permanent shadow tax, used to maintain the corruption and keep the thieves in place. And that cuts right to the heart of what this case is all about.""

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1ztoHnxK5

I really am beginning to think the big banks have gotten too big - not only too big to fail, but too big to act properly even in non-crisis times. This shows they're acting like a cartel now.