The bill would place a cap on any financial institution, limiting their total assets to 3% of GDP (that would lower to 2% for banks, as opposed to 3% for non-bank institutions). Currently, the 6 largest banks have holdings that equal 63% of GDP. The Safe Banking Act would also impose a 10% cap on any bank holding company’s share of insured deposits. Bank holding companies and “selected nonbank financial institutions” would have a leverage limit of 6%, meaning that they would not be able to lend out more than around sixteen dollars for every dollar of capital in house.

Here’s Jim DeMint talking to CBN about what he thinks all this Teabaggery really means.

In this new world order of supercorporations who earn their phantom profits by investing in politics, it is the “small businesses” who are being stifled and frozen out. Building a better mouse trap no longer matters, because the Acme Mouse Trap Company is writing legislation that makes it impossible to sell yours. Acme can build the shittiest mouse trap in the world, and never have to innovate, because their market is protected, their failures are subsidized and they pay no taxes. That gives them more money to plug back into the political system, and the cycle begins again.

The headline story in the Washington Post today states that Republicans, worried about being seen as too close to the big banks, especially in the wake of the Goldman Sachs scandal, are returning to the bargaining table and supportive of a bipartisan deal. This was how Democrats hoped this would turn out, that they could play a game of chicken and win, and that appears to be the case right now.

However, there’s nothing specific about any deal being discussed, just the notion that there is one in the works.

The Senate Banking Committee released the findings from its investigation of Washington Mutual – the largest S&L and largest bank failure. My research specialty is “control fraud.” These are frauds led by those that control seemingly legitimate entities and use them as a “weapon” to defraud. Financial control frauds’ “weapon of choice” is accounting. Lenders optimize accounting fraud by following a four-part recipe:

Extreme growth
Making bad loans at high interest rates
Extreme leverage
Trivial loss reserves

Given how little we have to go on, this is just a wildarsed guess: the interview questions included in last week’s FOIA document dump may have been used in CIA Inspector General’s review of the torture program while interviewing someone who, while at CTC, had had a supervisory role over the program. And I’m guessing John Durham withheld this document under the law enforcement privilege because he was using these questions to make better sense of the interview report, which presumably is one of the interview reports identified to have ties to the torture tapes, but which remains classified.

The Florida Republican Party faces a criminal investigation from the IRS, FBI and the US Attorney’s office over party-issued American Express card spending. And among the members of the state GOP implicated is none other than Marco Rubio.

To be sure, Charlie Crist is at most one step removed from this mess – Jim Greer was a top ally. But Rubio’s direct involvement has to weigh on his chances in the US Senate race. Rubio has a squeaky-clean, rock-ribbed conservative image that, when placed against this lavish personal spending and potential concealment, does not match.

The Shrill One: “Talking Points Memo reports that Democrats are largely unprepared for the possibility that Republicans will filibuster financial reform. Is this really possible? I’m afraid it is. My own conversations with administration officials over the past few weeks have given me the sense that they were quite sure that FinReg wouldn’t be like health care — and that they didn’t seem to take seriously those (including me) who thought they were taking too much for granted.”

Republicans have an ideological battle over financial reform.

James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti — It’s A Man’s World.