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from Rolfe Winkler:
Move your money
Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson are organizing a big bank boycott. They want depositors to take their money out of Too-Big-To-Fail banks and put them in smaller, high quality banks.
They've launched a new website and have teamed up with Chris Whalen to give folks other options. Whalen's firm, Institutional Risk Analytics, has a proprietary system that grades banks using FDIC data. Enter your zip code and Whalen provides a list of high quality banks in your area.
It's a potentially powerful combination. Huffington has wide reach due to her media ubiquity and popular website. Johnson, once a portfolio manager for George Soros's Quantum Fund, is a successful veteran of high finance who's spoken out against the danger of derivatives and will head Soros' $50 million Institute for New Economic Thinking. Leveraging Whalen's data means the two can do more than simply ask folks to move their money. They can provide better options.
(You can read more about it in this column published at HuffPo.)
I applaud the effort and plan on taking them up on it. Some of my savings currently reside at a TBTF bank, earning nothing, and I plan to move the account shortly.
from Rolfe Winkler:
Rob Johnson’s missing testimony
Recently Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism posted snippets of Rob Johnson's testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. The testimony he tried to give anyway. Johnson's commentary was rather trenchant, so I thought I'd click over to get the full version. But it wasn't where it was supposed to be on the Committee's website.
Ken Silverstein is on the case and he says it's "an object lesson in governmental failure." Turns out Johnson was asked to testify at the last minute and wasn't able to submit testimony at the hearing. Later when he tried to get it posted to the Committee's website, at first they dithered and then they refused.
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The Wall
