JPMorgan Swaps Occupying Cassino Prove Curse Like World War II
Destruction
From 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. (JPM) 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….
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