The Market Ticker
April 30, 2010

Senators Kaufman, Casey, Merkley, Whitehouse and Harkin (along with others who may pile on) have introduced a 20-page amendment to actually address “too big to fail.”

It is refreshingly simple legislation – 20 pages of common sense.

It limits firm size to 2% of GDP including off-balance sheet vehicles for banks, 3% for non-banks, and forces divestiture of overages.  It also requires reporting and testimony before Congress if regulators fail to promptly address violations.

In addition it places a hard cap of 10% of deposits in any one institution (a limit that already exists by the way, but has been wantonly violated by The Fed allowing mergers during the crisis that breached the limits – and yet there has been no requirement to divest.)

This would place a balance-sheet limit of about $280 billion on a bank.

This would put an instantaneous full-stop to the outrageous obscenity called “Wells Fargo”, which has $1.7 trillion in off-balance sheet “assets”, not to mention the other “big banks” that have hundreds of billions off sheet as well.

We now get to find out who is really for Wall Street reform – and who needs to lose their seat in The Senate.

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