MITT ROMNEY: CANDIDATE OF THE MEGABANKS

According to a recent poll, 84 percent of Americans oppose any more bank bailouts. Yet, Mitt Romney appears to be the candidate most likely to shower billions or even trillions on the megabanks at the first sign of trouble. Indeed, it is fair to say that Mitt Romney is the candidate of, by, and for, the megabanks.

For example, according to OpenSecrets.org Romney's top contributors are all megabanks: Goldman gave $676,080; JP Morgan gave $520,299; Morgan Stanley gave $513,647; BOA gave $510,728; Credit Suisse gave $427.560; Citi gave $363,015; Barclays gave $349,400; and so on and so forth.  Amazingly, the top eight Romney contributors are all global megabanks.

The same source, however, shows that the megabanks have abandoned President Obama. Not a single megabank has given his campaign more than $200,000 and only megabank appears among his top 15 contributors.

It is easy to see why the megabanks love Romney. His own campaign website claims he will seek to repeal Dodd-Frank (a rather mild regulatory initiative given the woeful misconduct of the megabanks in trashing our economy). His website does not even mention the TBTF problem or bank bailouts. According to American Banker magazine (published by the American Bankers Association) Romney is a free market believer who is against regulation and intervention except when the whole banking sector faces collapse; then, he favors (pragmatic) bailouts. I kid you not--just watch the video above. And, in this campaign Romney was the only GOP candidate who did not rule out future bailouts. Again, watch the video.

This is how the American Banker put it: "In the 2012 campaign, Romney has not spoken as forcefully against bailouts as some of his GOP rivals. During an October 2011 debate, Romney said he didn't like the idea of another Wall Street bailout, but he did leave the door open to that possibility." Or, in Romney's own words: "There's no question … that the action that President Bush and that Secretary Paulson took was designed to keep not just a collapse of individual banking institutions, but to keep the entire currency of the country worth something and to keep all the banks from closing and to make sure we didn't all lose our jobs. . . .Was it perfect? No. . . .But … this approach of saying, 'Look, we're going to have to preserve our currency and maintain America and our financial system' … is essential."

So, it makes sense that the entire megabank sector (even foreign megabanks like Credit Suisse, Barclay's and UBS) are backing Romney. He will let them run wild again and bail them out again.