The MSM is now actually comparing the fallout from JPM derivatives deals to the destruction wrought by the Nazis during WWII.
Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) — World War II’s Battle for Cassino leveled the Italian town and its hilltop abbey. Now, the 33,000 residents are digging out from the rubble left by Wall Street.
Six decades after U.S.-led forces ousted the Nazis from Cassino, a new generation is grappling with the fallout from the debts of postwar rebuilding — borrowings that grew because of a derivative that backfired. Soaring costs forced Cassino, 80 miles southeast of Rome, to settle an interest-rate swap with JPMorgan Chase & Co. in 2009, leaving the town unable to pay for daycare for 60 infants and services for the poor.
For Iris Volante, who chairs Cassino’s assembly finance committee, the bankers who share responsibility for peddling the derivatives should pay with their jobs. She, like Occupy Wall Street protesters around the world, is demanding an overhaul of the financial system to stop history from repeating itself.
“Heads rolling is the least we would expect,” Volante, a 57-year-old gynecologist who also has worked for the city for more than a decade, said in an interview in a Cassino cafe earlier this month. “When people’s attitude is to cheat others, new rules are needed to prevent it happening again.”
Cassino, whose government office overlooks a U.S. tank and other war relics in the town’s central square, plans to cut funding for its daycare center and may ask families to pay several hundred euros a month per child after running out of other cost-cutting measures, said Volante. The town already has reduced staff to about 250 employees from about 450 by not replacing those who left or retired, she said.
Read more:
