Bank blackmail

It seems to me that the United States are now being blackmailed by the large financial institutions.  This is an excerpt from the Financial Times (ft.com) recently:

“With executives such as Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon due in Washington on Wednesday to testify before a congressional commission into the crisis amid a storm over bonuses, senior bankers said they felt under siege.

Concept Capital, a Washington-based research group estimates that, if the Obama administration wanted to raise $100bn or more, large dep­osit-taking banks might have to pay about $20bn each although the final amounts could be smaller.

One senior banker said: “The bottom line is that we have a bottom line. If our costs rise, we will charge people more. This levy idea could actually backfire and end up harming the economy and consumers.”

To me, this means that the banks will simply charge more if we dare do anything to control them.