Links: Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

This should make you angry.  You're paying for it, and will pay perhaps thousands of dollars for it.
You.  Personally. And that may be if you're just lucky, since this sort of things screws up civilizations.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bank-of-america-too-crooked-to-fail-20120314


Higher taxes. Higher prices.  Fewer services. Degraded quality of life.

The bank(s) is(are) half the problem.  The essential complicity of our government is the other half.

And more of the same with the so called JOBS bill  (Jump-start Our Business Startups) now going through Congress.   Investors will have another reason to beware, since it essentially reduces or does away with a lot of pesky disclosure formerly required of companies raising money from the public. Not that that will be a real problem, except to the suckers, er, investors, any company unwilling to disclose is looking for. 

Further, there is no reason to invest in an economy that is essentially frozen by excessive rent seeking, and as Matt Taibbi documents, is increasingly run as a Kleptocracy.

And this is the real reason for the decline in IPOs. (IPO is initial public offerings, the stock companies offer when they go public.) After all, disclosure wasn't a problem before  Certainly not in the 1990's, when there were hundreds each year, despite the disclosure laws they are now getting rid of.
 
As far as I can tell, the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats seem to use a little more grease.