To quote Matthew C Klein at Bloomberg Review:
No matter how you count it, U.S. taxpayers continue to transfer tens of billions of dollars each year to the big banks.According to an article by David Dayen in The American Prospect (http://prospect.org/article/wall-streets-subsidy-safety-net), in recent reports both the Fed and the IMF..
agreed that mega-banks, in America and abroad, enjoy a lower cost of borrowing than their competitors, based on the perception that governments will bail them out if they run into trouble. This advantage effectively works as a government subsidy for the largest banks, allowing them to take additional risks and threaten another economic meltdown.Dayen is hopeful, as am I, that chances for reforming the financial system will get better as Wall Street becomes isolated in denying that banks benefit from government largess.
