Massachusetts Teamsters worked hard for Elizabeth Warren's election to the U.S. Senate because she gets what the big banks are doing.
In the clip, Warren is referring to a recent Bloomberg analysis that showed U.S. taxpayers are giving $83 billion in annual subsidies to too-big-to-fail (and too-big-to-jail) banks:
The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail.
Lately, economists have tried to pin down exactly how much the subsidy lowers big banks’ borrowing costs. In one relatively thorough effort, two researchers ... put the number at about 0.8 percentage point. The discount applies to all their liabilities, including bonds and customer deposits...
Small as it might sound, 0.8 percentage point makes a big difference. Multiplied by the total liabilities of the 10 largest U.S. banks by assets, it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion a year. To put the figure in perspective, it’s tantamount to the government giving the banks about 3 cents of every tax dollar collected.
The top five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. - - account for $64 billion of the total subsidy, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits.Outraged yet? If not, consider this: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are all linked to the
Oh, and we knew
