Crikey

In an uncharacteristic display of appreciation, Citibank boss Vikram Pandit thanked US taxpayers for bailing out the world’s once biggest financial institution. Pandit told lawmakers that “Citi owes a large debt of gratitude to American taxpayers [with the bailout money building] a bridge over the crisis to a sound footing on the other side.”

However, as the LA Times reported, Citibank showed those same taxpayers just how thankful it was by “slapping a $60 annual fee on many credit cards that previously had no fees and telling customers that if they don’t like it, tough patooties”.

Admittedly, Citi is far from the only bank acting with questionable morality — as the brilliant Matt Taibbi detailed in this month’s Rolling Stone, “the nation’s six largest banks — all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry — set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007.” (It is somewhat ironic that arguably the articles about Wall Street’s banks have been written by  a journalist who writes for a music magazine described as “revolutionary, wild and unpredictable”).

Taibbi (who previously described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” described the schemes used by the banks to boost short term profits and maximise bonuses paid to staff since the onset of the credit crunch. Taibbi noted:

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they’re back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the US government. In the process, they’re rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

From the “swoop and squat” (which involved banks such as Goldman Sachs selling sub-prime mortgages to clients and then taking CDO “insurance policies” with AIG by betting against those very instruments) to the “pig in the poke”, which relied on recent changes to accounting rules allowing banks avoid reporting losses on dud investments until they are eventually sold.

The tricks didn’t end there — Taibbi also reported that investment banks Goldman Sachs ($US29 billion),  JP Morgan Chase ($US38 billion) and Bank of America ($US44 billion) borrowed billions from the Fed in addition to the well-documented TARP handouts, as well as allegedly “front running” clients on their own trading desks through sophisticated “flash” computerised trading programs.

The message is simple — banks are profiting through short-term measures at the expense of taxpayers and clients, with the fruits of those activities being accrued by the same executives and bankers who got their institutions into trouble in the first place. Or as Tabbai put it, the banks took:

Massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, sh-t — who wouldn’t deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?

But the problem isn’t exclusive to the United States. Last year Australian banks paid millions of dollars in bonuses to executives such as  Gail Kelly and Mike Smith while at the same time benefiting from government guarantees on wholesale borrowing, deposit guarantees and the first home owner’s grant, which created a boom in lending. Not to mention the fact that Australian banks are world leaders in charging legally dubious penalty fees to their loyal customers.

Forget porn — when it comes to pure obscenity, it is hard to go past bankers.

Adam Schwab is the author of Pigs at the Trough: Lessons from Australia’s Decade of Corporate Greed, published by John Wiley & Sons and available online from Booktopia.