The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation or DTCC is possibly Ground Zero for the US Empire’s potential coming economic collapse, because it is the primary and dominant insuring company that guarantees pay outs for those who hold junk stocks, if they go belly up.

‘DTCC’s DTC depository provides custody and asset servicing for 3.5 million securities issues, comprised mostly of stocks and bonds, from the United States and 110 other countries and territories, valued at $40 trillion, more than any other depository in the world. In 2007, DTCC settled the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States, more than $1.86 quadrillion in value.’ Taken from wikipedia’s DTCC entry

Looking to see who is in charge at DTCC? Nice group of pics, right? Nice people I’m sure… lol… Good patriotic Americans and what all.

The DTCC history show 2 events that pushed this corporate outfit to the head. One was Bill Clinton’s deregulation of securities signed into law in 2000 at the end of his presidency, and the other was 9/11.

9/11 effectively was the death blow to paper securities, and DTCC was right there offering electronic securities instead. Here at DTCC’s site one finds this brief explanation of No More Paper: The Problems with Paper …see below

Q. I have heard that many securities were lost on 9/11. Is that true?

A. Yes, although they were eventually all replaced. Some $16 billion worth of certificates disappeared in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, and it took many months and nearly $300 million in industry costs to replace them. During this period, electronic records were used to ensure the owners of the securities could be identified. Meanwhile, shares held electronically were not harmed at all on 9/11.

OK, that’s nice…. And here, written in 1999 about the Clinton Administration’s proposed financial deregulation of that year that then later allowed the rise of even more speculative securities and the eventual domination of DTCC over the securities market, is the following…

***Threat to financial stability***

The proposed deregulation will increase the degree of monopolization in finance and worsen the position of consumers in relation to creditors. Even more significant is its impact on the overall stability of US and world capitalism. The bill ties the banking system and the insurance industry even more directly to the volatile US stock market, virtually guaranteeing that any significant plunge on Wall Street will have an immediate and catastrophic impact throughout the US financial system.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which the deregulation bill would repeal, was not adopted to protect consumers, although one of its most celebrated provisions was the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees bank deposits of up to $100,000. The law was enacted during the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration to rescue a banking system which had collapsed, wiping out the life savings of millions of working people, and threatening to bring the profit system to a complete standstill.

As a recent history of that era notes: “The more than five thousand bank failures between the Crash and the New Deal’s rescue operation in March 1933 wiped out some $7 billion in depositors’ money. Accelerating foreclosures on defaulted home mortgages—150,000 homeowners lost their property in 1930, 200,000 in 1931, 250,000 in 1932—stripped millions of people of both shelter and life savings at a single stroke and menaced the balance sheets of thousands of surviving banks” (David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 162-63).

The separation of banking and the stock exchange was ordered in response to revelations of the gross corruption and manipulation of the market by giant banking houses, above all the House of Morgan, which organized huge corporate mergers for its own profit and awarded preferential access to share issues to favored politicians and businessmen. Such insider trading played a major role in the speculative boom which preceded the 1929 crash.

Over the past 20 years the restrictions imposed by Glass-Steagall have been gradually relaxed under pressure from the banks, which sought more profitable outlets for their capital, especially in the booming stock market, and which complained that foreign competitors suffered no such limitations to their financial operations. In 1990 the Federal Reserve Board first permitted a bank (J.P. Morgan) to sell stock through a subsidiary, although stock market operations were limited to 10 percent of the company’s total revenue. In 1996 this ceiling was lifted to 25 percent. Now it will be abolished.

The Wall Street Journal celebrated the agreement to end such restrictions with an editorial declaring that the banks had been unfairly scapegoated for the Great Depression. The headline of one Journal article detailing the impact of the proposed law declared, “Finally, 1929 Begins to Fade.”

This comment underscores the greatest irony in the banking deregulation bill. Legislation first adopted to save American capitalism from the consequences of the 1929 Wall Street Crash is being abolished just at the point where the conditions are emerging for an even greater speculative financial collapse. The enormous volatility in the stock exchange in recent months has been accompanied by repeated warnings that stocks are grossly overvalued, with some computer and Internet stocks selling at prices 100 times earnings or even greater.

And there is a much more recent experience than 1929 to serve as a cautionary tale. A financial deregulation bill was passed in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration, lifting many restrictions on the activities of savings and loan associations, which had previously been limited primarily to the home-loan market. The result was an orgy of speculation, profiteering and outright plundering of assets, culminating in collapse and the biggest financial bailout in US history, costing the federal government more than $500 billion. The repetition of such events in the much larger banking and securities markets would be beyond the scope of any federal bailout.

The complete article published back in 1999 at Clinton, Republicans agree to deregulation of US financial system Almost a totally prophetic article, as it turns out. So now we wait and see if all the government money thrown at these financial pirates…YES, financial pirates…’works’? Will it be capable of floating all this junk held insured by DTCC?